This docudrama celebrates the colorful lives of teens who live in the South Bronx. There they are seen break dancing, creating graffiti art, and listening to raucous rap. The slim story centers on Zoro, who likes to spray-paint subway cars. He gets a break when he is hired to decorate a platform for an upcoming rap concert. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi
Charlie Ahearn's groundbreaking film about hip-hop, graffiti, break dancing, and rap in eighties New York celebrates its 25th anniversary with a new 35-mm. print.
Hip-hop rolls on tractor treads now, unafraid to colonize those who hesitate, but in 1982 it was small, self-selecting, and as specific to New York as the World Trade Center.
The pacing is slow -- inexcusable in a film about music -- except when hip-hop takes over, and Ahearn wisely gives plenty of screen time to the likes of Busy Bee, Rock Steady Crew, and Fab Five Freddy.
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.
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
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