To coincide with the release of her latest album, the singer offers fans a Prime Video original project about a woman struggling with self-love.

On her 2002 album This is Me…Then, Jennifer Lopez included a song addressing Ben Affleck. “Dear Ben” is a confession and a love letter to Affleck, whom the singer met and started dating during the shooting of the film Gigli.  The album was released two weeks after the pair’s engagement. The song ends with a now melancholic coda: “There’s no way I’d leave you / It’s just not a reality / Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a fantasy.” A year later, after Lopez and Affleck postponed their wedding, the pair broke up.

The three-part project includes an upcoming documentary (set to premiere Feb. 27 on Prime Video) and an un-categorizable narrative movie, This is Me… Now: A Love Story. The latter, which will premiere on Prime Video on Feb. 16, is a frenetic autobiographically-inspired reflection wrapped in a fairytale and colored by bizarre astrology musings from a starry cast. To watch This is Me… Now is to witness Lopez’s unapologetic vision and uniquely powerful self-confidence. It’s to see how a certain kind of celebrity and financial access allows you to, quite frankly, do whatever you want against the fair warnings of detractors. The film is not good, but it is singular — and absolutely chaotic.

Lopez, whose character is known simply as the Artist, fashions herself as Alida. We know who her Taroo will be based on given an early sequence in the film in which Lopez rides on the back of a motorcycle driven by a man with Affleck’s profile. Their journey through the mountains is cut short by a crash, which instigates a broken heart and the first song-and-dance number of the film. Inside the Artist’s heart is a factory managed by Lopez and run by an army of people in utility suits and overalls. They jump and flip and glide across surfaces in unison as they make their way to the mechanical heart, which is on the verge of exploding. The mostly forgettable music in A Love Story comes from Lopez’s album, which will also be released on Feb. 16. The project is a musical film held together by the thinnest of narratives.

All is not well when we leave the heart to go to a grand apartment complex made entirely of glass. The Artist has moved on to another relationship, but this one is toxic and abusive. Lopez sings through it and eventually makes her way back to the safety of her friends and her therapist, played by Fat Joe. A Love Story kicks into gear here, with Lopez, always a fine romantic comedy actress, turning on the charm and delivering an engaging performance. There are glimpses into her therapy sessions, during which her analyst probes the Artist about what these relationships, often short-lived and unfulfilling, offer her. In other words, what does she want?

Love, of course. A Love Story is a paean to Lopez’s life as a hopeless romantic and as a Leo. There’s a significant astrology thread in the film, wherein the council of Zodiac signs convenes to discuss their challenging human. Scorpio (Keke Palmer), Cancer (Sofia Vergara), Libra (Trevor Noah), Leo (Post Malone), Taurus (Neil deGrasse Tyson), Virgo (Kim Petras), Aries (Jay Shetty), Pisces (Sadhguru), Gemini (Jennifer Lewis) and Cancer (Jane Fonda) are among the celestial beings that worry about the Artist. The men they throw her way — even the most compatible — don’t seem to stick. The Artist burns through relationships faster than anyone they have ever seen.

 A Love Story jerks and jolts until the final number. The film operates according to dream logic — it’s a lot of nonsense peppered with poignant, if obvious, insights. There’s an alternate timeline where A Love Story is a solid romantic comedy instead of a confusing clash of forms and genres. Lopez is most appealing as a leading lady, and in her best roles she harnesses the anxieties and aspirations of hopeless romantics without trying to be so, well, literal. She shows us what it means to live in the fantasy of romance and lets the love story speak for itself.