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Jennifer Lopez wasn't always convinced she wanted to make a movie about Puerto Rican salsa great Héctor Lavoe, says Leon Ichaso, director of El Cantante, the biopic that features Lopez and real-life hubby Marc Anthony tearing up a funky New York in slick disco duds.

''My idea was to put a historical frame around the relationship between Héctor and his wife Puchi. Not only be a love story of a dysfunctional couple, but be able to show the world what those salsa days were like,'' Ichaso, director of El Super, Bitter Sugar and Piñero, says over skirt steak and mashed potatoes at Chocolate Inc. on South Beach's Española Way.

Several years ago, Ichaso showed up for a meeting with Lopez, who had just launched her production company, Nuyorican. He had with him a documentary about salsa by filmmaker Leon Gast (who won a best-documentary Oscar for When We Were Kings).

''Nobody knew how to work the VCR, but [J.Lo's then-squeeze] Ben Affleck came and put the tape on,'' Ichaso says. 'A block party in the middle of the Lower East Side appeared on the screen. Jennifer started screaming, `That's my movie! That's my movie!' It was the Fania All-Stars playing on the steps of this church. Everybody was coming out of their windows to watch them. She began to understand that this was important, that this mattered.''

Lavoe, as sophisticated as he was streetwise, was called the ''Barrio Poet'' by bandleader Larry Harlow. He was one of the Fania standouts, a powerhouse singer who made top-selling albums through the 1960s and 1970s, collaborating with famed trombonist and bandleader Willie Colón on many recordings before going off on his own in the mid-1970s.

Ichaso, who was born in Cuba in 1948, arrived in New York in 1967, as the salsa scene was taking off. He had a front-row seat for much of Lavoe's, and salsa's, development.

``I went to New York with my dad to work in advertising. We stayed in this dumpy hotel called The Diplomat in Times Square. They had Black Panther fundraisers, drag-queen balls, and, once a month, salsa. Once, I wandered into this ballroom and saw Héctor Lavoe. I got the shock through my body that I got when my family took me to carnaval in Havana. Something just woke up in me.''

IN-YOUR-FACE MUSIC

It was an era when many Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans and other Hispanic immigrants living in New York were waking up, the pulsing sound of a new in-your-face music called salsa offering the soundtrack for the first stirrings of political and cultural awareness. Salsa was something new, something U.S.-born, but it never strayed far from its Latin roots.

''It was the '60s. Everybody felt liberated. Black was beautiful. Salseros wore dashikis. The music was called salsa dura or salsa brava. It was roots music, but it was a lot more hardcore than that. Everybody was playing for their lives,'' says Ichaso, who first lived in Miami after he left Cuba in his teens, but his long hair, sandals and affinity for rock 'n' roll made it hard for him to fit in with straitlaced Cuban exile kids.

``I had to escape the Miami of the '60s. I got beat up on Lincoln Road by Cuban kids who had made a little bit of a gang to beat up anybody who smoked grass.''

Some critics have slammed El Cantante, which opened last week, for telling what amounts to a clichéd rise-and-fall about a musician who squandered the spotlight with his boozing and drugging.

DEFENDS HIS FILM

But Ichaso defends his story about one of the most important voices in salsa. Today Lavoe is revered by old-school salseros as well as young rappers and rockers. He died of AIDS at 46 in 1993 after years of living in a coke-and-heroine haze.

And yes, he may not have been the first performer to crash and burn -- but his unraveling is just as worthy of the big screen as anybody else's, says Ichaso.

``He has a dramatic story. You can tell the Ruben Blades story, but he is such a goody-goody. There's Celia Cruz, and she was very successful, but her story is sort of flat. The one dramatic thing that happens to her is that her mother dies in Cuba, and she has to go on stage that night in Mexico. The Cuban government doesn't let her back into the island to bury her. But that becomes just a moment in a movie. El Cantante is not a composite. It's the story of a real guy. And this is his real story.''

A movie about Lavoe might have told us more about Fania, the record label many called the Motown of salsa. It might have gotten into some of the well-documented shady dealings of the time, might have said more about the artists who got shafted. But Ichaso wasn't interested in going there.

''That would be another movie,'' he says. ``You could ask me how many times I've been robbed. Fania at least gave them a home. They were exploited everywhere they went. Fania took them to Madison Square Garden, Yankee Stadium, around the world. It goes with every musical genre that people get ripped off. Also in movies, book publishing. We are never happy with the accounting.''

BICULTURAL PROJECT

In the end, no matter what the critics say about El Cantante, it still feels notable, a bicultural project that is authentically Hispanic, unlike some Hollywood attempts to tell Hispanic stories with non-Hispanics on both sides of the camera, featuring feigned Spanish accents by actors like Marisa Tomei, Armand Assante and Al Pacino. El Cantante gets points because it doesn't feel forged. It's a movie by a Hispanic director, starring two of the day's best-known and most bankable Hispanic stars giving props -- Lopez also produces -- to their cultural past.

Plus, at least it's not Gigli. There is good, hot chemistry between Lopez and Anthony, a salsa great himself. That's a lot more than you could say for Lopez and Affleck and their attempt to share the big screen.

So, not to focus too much on the prurient, but what were Lopez and Anthony like together on the set?

''She is a perfectionist,'' Ichaso says. ``She comes super-prepared. Marc comes totally unprepared. He is writing his lines on a pack of cigarettes and Jennifer is fuming, steam is coming out of her nose. She wants to kill him. In a very affectionate and playful way. It did feel like they were playing Hector and Puchi. In that sense, I had to be a marriage counselor once in a while. But they laughed a lot.''