“What you are about to see is a combination of fact and fantasy. Weigh the facts and enjoy the pretense,” El Pachuco exhorts the film/play audience of the filmed-play, Zoot Suit. El Pachuco: sinister hero, alter ego and apotheosis of cool for every Chicano kid; narrator and stage manager (à la “Our Town”--nuestro barrio) throughout Luis Valdez's energetic Brechtian musical. Valdez makes no pretense to realism--Zoot Suit has three alternative endings--but his film is one of the “truest” to emerge in recent years, and possibly the most reflective ever of Chicano sensibilities. Valdez weaves a setting around Chicano myths and stereotypes--for men, the zoot-suited Pachuco and the '38 Chevy; for women, the flowery, full skirted, greeting card romance and the '38 Chevy; for both, la familia. Then there is reality--a plot, of sorts: it's summer of '42, at the height of wartime jingoism, when a murder at Sleepy Lagoon brought on the arrest of 600 Pachucos, the trial of 22 and life sentences for 12. Among the latter group is Henry Reyna, whose story is chronicled by Valdez in a distanced, stagey, highly stylized manner; no more tears, it's time to analyze. Zoot Suit is great musical theater on film.