Arne Glimcher, Ole!

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.