Pinero

PINERO Benjamin Bratt, Giancarlo Esposito (2001, Miramax, 94 mins., R, also on DVD) Poet/author/ actor/junkie/ex-con Miguel Pinero made his bones with the bracing 1974 Off Broadway prison drama, Short Eyes, and by cofounding New York City’s neo-Beat Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Bratt brings electric life to the tortured Pinero (who died in 1988 from cirrhosis of the liver), managing to mostly avoid the triteness of the artist-as-outlaw trope. Unfortunately, writer-director Leon Ichaso’s jittery shifting of time, tone, and film stock tries for a narrative complement to its subject’s fragmented life, but is too often merely distracting.