Directing: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

When this documentary was being filmed, diretor Mariem Pérez Riera had camera access to Rita Moreno’s 87th birthday party. In the footage of the setup. Moreno says she’s been hosting costume parties for her birthday every year since she turned 77—that’s ten years, in what for most people would be twilight years but for Moreno seems to be as full of vitality as any other time in her life.

That was in 2018. Rita Moreno was born near the end of 1931, and as I write this, she would be 89. And if this film has anything to say about it, her life and career are extraordinary. Her first credited role was in 1950, when she was all of eighteen years old, and she soon had a contract with a film studio, her career owned and managed in the typical way of the time—her key difference being that she was Latina. In her present-day interviews in Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It, Moreno reminisces about her naiveté at the start of her career, and the heinously forward way men in the industry spoke to her.

There’s a moment in this film when Moreno notes that fame is unpredictable: “It goes up and down,” she says. “Right now, it’s up.” She’s been around so long that someone like me can be middle-aged and still only have been alive for about two thirds of her career. Of course, anyone who knows anything about her knows about her Oscar-winning role as Anita in the 1961 movie musical West Side Story, easily the most iconic role of her career. What I didn’t know is that she had been working for eleven years by then, or that the role marked a seismic shift in her career trajectory, after years of being relegated to parts for countless nonwhite ethnicities that were not even Latina, let alone Puerto Rican.

She didn’t even have another major film role for most of the rest of the sixties, but it’s stated in this film that her career didn’t rise in the wake of that Oscar win, so much as expand. By 1977 she became only the third person to win an EGOT: an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony Award.

There’s a lot about Rita Moreno’s career I didn’t know about. For the most part, I knew her as Anita from West Side Story, and then as the grandmother Lydia on the Netflix reboot of One Day at a Time (2017-2020; highly recommend). I’ve never seen the HBO series Oz (1997-2003), but now that I know she played a nun on that show, I might finally have to check it out. Long before that, she had an on-again, off-again relationship with Marlon Brando for some seven years, and then costarred with him in the 1969 film The Night of the Following Day (which really doesn’t look that good). She costarred with Morgan Freeman through most of the seventies in the children’s series The Electric Company.

These few examples just scratch the surface of her seven-decade career, and with skilled editing this means there’s never a dull moment in the 90 minutes of Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It. It’s mostly contemporary interviews with her, but also features interviews with many of the people she’s worked with, and others who admire her. She’s amassed a large collection of awards, and at one she decides to get playful and make a T-shirt part of her outfit, which reads Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It, hence this film’s subtitle.

There’s always a predictable bias to films like this. Rita Moreno is a beloved figure, and Mariem Pérez Riera clearly has not interest in showing Moreno in anything but a flattering light. On the Sally Struthers episode of the WTF with Marc Maron podcast in April, when talking about working together in the 1985 gender-swapped stage production of The Odd Couple, Struthers described Moreno as “just a mean, difficult human being.” You’ll find no such sentiments here in this documentary—and it’s just as well. Bias or not, I only mention the Struthers criticism because it’s the only open resentment toward Moreno that I can find. Ironically, that actually reflects on Moreno pretty well.

And Moreno’s screen presence, even at 87, is straight up infectious. If only we could all have that much energy and be so full of life at that age. No one I have ever known to make it that age remained that mentally sharp. This woman has an incredible memory, an incredible life, and an incredible story. You don’t have to be any more intimately familiar with the whole arc of her career than I was to find it fascinating.

*And the rest of you should just decide to go see this movie.*