Wild Style (1982)

Wild Style is just as important a New York City musical as On the Town, so vital and exuberant are its scenes of a burgeoning cultural moment.

A poorly-acted shambles.

It's great to see again this bolt of ghetto joy, a kind of updated West Side Story, that shows hip-hop as a living, breathing expression of cultural resistance rather than a crunky, cheerless set of cruddy grunts and boasts from which to make money.

Nothing else comes close to capturing the atmosphere of the early days of hip-hop and spraycan art, of the burned-out and derelict Bronx.

This unpolished but authentic film, a drama with the honesty of a documentary, shows hip-hop pure and unvarnished.

The acting is stilted, and the story almost non-existent. But that isn't the point, Wild Style is a cult classic - indisputably the most important hip hop movie, ever.

Mixing early-’80s nostalgia with mild social anthropology, the film successfully crystallises the optimism and vivacity of the early New York hip hop scene and suggests that film and TV portrayals of the Bronx as a savage and inhospitable hellhole were pe