Arne Glimcher, Ole!

By RICHARD CORLISS

Cesar Castillo, newly arrived from Cuba to make his fortune as a bandleader in New York City's thriving Latino music scene, has a prayer for success: "In the name of the mambo and the rumba and the cha-cha-cha." Arne Glimcher, director of the exuberant new movie The Mambo Kings, may have a prayer of his own: In the name of the Cubans and the moguls and the public's whim.

The Cubans, it appears, are already in Glimcher's pocket. On opening night of the Miami Film Festival last month, they virtually adopted the director, a nice Jewish boy from Duluth, Minn., as an honorary Cuban. "They were so in the movie," Glimcher says, still beaming. "They moved in their seats like a wave. When the music played, there was not a still lap." The moguls are no problem either. As the Bel Air screening circuit has spread the good word, studio bosses have pummeled this novice director with dozens of scripts. (Thanks, but he prefers to develop his own projects.)

And the public? Glimcher can only hope people take to his movie -- based on the first half of Oscar Hijuelos' Pulitzer-prizewinning novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love -- as Cesar takes to America: with love at first sight.

For Cesar (Armand Assante), America is a gorgeous woman; he wants to make crazy, expert love to it all night long, as he does to the gloriously trashy Lanna Lake (Cathy Moriarty). For his brother Nestor (Antonio Banderas), who composes romantic ballads and mopes soulfully, Cuba is the woman he left behind -- the "beautiful Maria" he sings of and pines for.

The movie's Mambo Kings become famous in the mid-'50s for one hit album, some saucy nightclub gigs and a fleeting appearance on the I Love Lucy show (reconstructed here with artfully interpolated footage of the brothers, Lucille Ball and, standing in for his dad, Desi Arnaz Jr.). But theirs is a ^ story of wanting, not necessarily getting. In Cynthia Cidre's witty, synoptic screenplay, The Mambo Kings becomes a parable about the intoxication of dreaming of success; it's The Commitments with a Cuban accent.

While waiting for their big break, the brothers are discouraged by nothing -- not by the long hours in a meat-packing plant, not by the bridge-and-tunnel bar mitzvahs and Legionnaire birthday parties they must play. The cheerfulness of Cesar's servitude is a big part of his and the movie's charm. As brought to impossibly glamorous life in Assante's performance, Cesar has fun doing almost anything; he can dance a sinfully erotic tango with Nestor's wife-to-be (Maruschka Detmers) and not consider it a promise or a poach. He sees life, in its painful as well as its ecstatic moments, as a wouldn't-miss-it party. And so is The Mambo Kings: an old-fashioned, music-and-dance, brothers-and- lovers fiesta.

How difficult it must be to make 'em like they used to! Reinventing movie innocence was the task facing Glimcher, 53, an art dealer who is breaking in as a director after three decades of running Manhattan's powerful Pace Gallery. He knows that the temptations on the brothers' via dolorosa will be as familiar to a late-show viewer as those that befell Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. So there's something heroic about treating two men's love for each other as if it still could appear honest and profound. "For me," Glimcher says, "life is a series of romances and passions. It's a hard way but rewarding way to live. What I'm interested in is urgency. That's the mosaic of this story, which I deeply believe in." And believing makes it so. Presto! a fable with the style and guilelessness of Hollywood's Golden Age.

This from a man who holds no special fondness for the industry today. (Before directing, Glimcher produced Gorillas in the Mist and, less happily, The Good Mother.) "Hollywood is a battleground," he says. "The New York art world is, by and large, still a community. It moves as a single organism with many legs. People are here because they are in love with art and want a life in art."

Since modern art helped form Glimcher's famous taste, he can be expected to daub some of it on his screen. A poignant scene of Cesar and Nestor in a Times Square photo booth was influenced by Andy Warhol; it replicates a visit Glimcher and his family made to have their snaps taken for a Warhol portrait. Close watchers of The Mambo Kings will also discern the phantom signatures of a few revered auteurs. "I like Bob Fosse's films very much," Glimcher says. "So the strip joint in my film and the close-up of a decrepit stripper's knee give off echoes of Sweet Charity. Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull is a film that means the world to me, and when you first see Cathy Moriarty here, she's wearing the upswept hairdo from Raging Bull." In the audience's mind -- which blends past and present, actress and character -- Moriarty can walk out of Jake La Motta's life and into Cesar Castillo's.

There are longueurs toward the end of the movie, when Nestor's morose vibes infect too many of those closest to him. But mostly this is a celebration. The film pays tribute to the unslakable ambitions of the next-to-last group of immigrants who embraced the capaciousness of the American promise. See The Mambo Kings -- attend to its music and its sensuous moves -- and try, just try, to keep from dancing out of the theater. For two bouncy hours, whether you are a gas pumper in Omaha or an art dealer looking for new canvases to conquer, you can be a Cuban in love.