The title song that opens the film starts quietly with a tentative percussion beat as Anthony Ramos, as narrator-protagonist Usnavi, eases into the intro’s freestyle rapping while the camera captures parts of Upper Manhattan. Main characters are introduced on a warm summer’s day, crawling out of bed, spilling out of their brownstone apartment buildings, hopping on buses and heading to work.

Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the first draft of the original musical while he was at Wesleyan in the late ’90s and went on to develop it with director Thomas Kail and playwright Quiara Alegria Hudes. It had a successful off-Broadway debut in 2007, transferring to Broadway the following year and winning four Tony Awards, including best musical and best original score for Miranda.

In that stage production, Miranda played Usnavi, a Washington Heights bodega owner named after the U.S. Navy ship first sighted by his Dominican parents on arrival in the U.S. In the film version directed by Jon M. Chu, Miranda ages up into the happily hammy role of the Piragüero, who pushes his cart through the neighborhood selling fruit-flavored shaved-ice desserts.

The roots of Miranda’s global blockbuster “Hamilton” are readily apparent in this less sophisticated earlier work, in its themes of self-determination and the immigrant contribution, as well as some of its musical motifs.

It’s obvious why the show was a breath of fresh air on predominantly white Broadway, where it ran for almost three years. Just the celebratory representation of striving working-class Latino characters — with one foot in cultural tradition and the other seeking traction in the American Dream — alone was refreshing. The same can be spoken of the musical language, a blend of Latin American pop, hip-hop, jazz, salsa and merengue with traditional Broadway show tunes.

The primary plotline involves Usnavi’s ambition to sell up and buy the beach refreshment kiosk once owned by his father back in the Dominican Republic, the setting of a childhood vacation that still provides his happiest memories. That plan, however, means giving up any chance that his longtime infatuation with Vanessa (Melissa Barrera) will develop into love. She’s hoping to move to downtown to break into the fashion industry.

Usnavi was raised since his parents’ early death by Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz), the Cuban surrogate grandmother to pretty much the entire community, whom he plans to take with him. He also hopes to coax his teenage cousin and bodega helper Sonny (Gregory Diaz IV) into joining them. Sonny’s home life with his boozing dad doesn’t provide good reason to stay, but the kid feels his place is in the U.S., even if his undocumented status poses challenges.

One of screenwriter Quiara Alegria Hudes’ most significant updates to the material is introducing an immigrant rights protest at a climactic point. Elsewhere, the screenplay eases over some of the show’s conflicts, including parental objections to the story’s secondary romance due to differences in racial background.

That union is between Benny (Corey Hawkins), the Black dispatch worker at cab service Rosario’s, and Nina (Leslie Grace), whose widowed father Kevin (Jimmy Smits) owns the struggling business. Nina has dropped out of Stanford at the end of freshman year, feeling like an outsider in that atmosphere of wealth and privilege but using the financial burden as her justification. Kevin’s self-reproach over being unable to fund his daughter’s education opportunities causes him to consider drastic measures after already selling off half his storefront.

The discovery that a winning US$96,000 lottery ticket was purchased at Usnavi’s store prompts another of Chu’s splashy set-pieces.

But the owner of the winning ticket is withheld until the end of the movie in a disclosure that few won’t see coming.

(SD-Agencies)