"I had to keep being bad to keep the writing good. I sell trouble," says Benjamin Bratt in Piñero, in a line that pretty much sums up the central irony of its subject's life. Too bad that, outside of Bratt's memorable performance, this biopic has so little to offer beyond that idea. Miguel Piñero was born in Puerto Rico, embarked early on a life of crime, did hard time, swept the Tony Awards with his prison-themed play Short Eyes, helped found the Nuyorican Poets Café, did guest spots on The Equalizer and Miami Vice, and died of his own excesses in 1988. If not for that final event, writer-director Leon Ichaso (El Súper, Sugar Hill) probably would not have been inspired to make Piñero; his focus on Piñero's final days, at the expense of every other phase of his life, borders on biography abuse. If the film is to be believed, Piñero's long descent into homelessness and drug addiction began virtually as the first curtain rose on Short Eyes, but here Piñero's accomplishments serve less as ironic counterpoint to his inevitable downfall than as set dressing. It doesn't help that Ichaso's film plays like a conventional biopic shoved through an arthouse filter. Alternating randomly between black-and-white and color—both achieved through not-so-miraculous digital-video technology—the film presents its subject's life in a chronology-breaking order that suggests a disastrous failure of communication in the editing suite or a reel mix-up in the projection booth. In the end, Piñero doesn't make much of a case for its subject as anything but an object of pity. When Ichaso takes a break from showing the playwright's sad decline or offering dubious psychological shorthand to explain it, the film's excerpts from Piñero's work never electrify the way they should. What does, and what almost saves the film from itself, is Bratt's performance, a thorough inhabiting of a character whose ever-smiling charisma masks an artist, a con man, and a tortured soul, all as component parts that couldn't survive without each other. If Ichaso could have found a way to convey that half as well as his leading man, he might have been on to something.