Planet B-Boy

Planet B-Boy rescues break dancing from ’80s nostalgia and restores its place as a true art form. It’s also an exciting film, featuring one of the most thrilling openings seen in a documentary. The first three minutes hit the viewer with photomontages, vintage videos, smart sound bites, contemporary interviews, hard-hitting music and lots of footage of young guys spinning on their heads. It captures the spirit of its subject and sets us up for the championship at stake. The film falls into two sections. First, director Benson Lee introduces the teams and offers a brief history of break dancing, marking the 1983 film Flashdance as a seminal inspiration to many around the world. Though the French have style and the Americans the legacy, the Japanese and South Korean teams are aggressive upstarts. What all the b-boys have in common is that they’re poor or come from broken homes. They need something in their lives and they chose breaking. The second half centres on the international championships in Germany. There is shot after shot of amazing footage, both of solo dancers and group-choreographed routines where b-boys bounce on their hands and leap across the stage. The energy is off the charts and the footage dazzling. The problem is that there’s little drama behind the scenes. What are the stakes? What does each team risk if they lose? The film also sells short the history of break dancing. Fortunately those moments are found in the bonus footage offered on this DVD. Old B-boys nostalgically recall the Bronx of the early ’80s where kids who’d otherwise be in gangs would compete by dancing. What galvanized these disparate battles were photographers such as Martha Cooper, who was the first to publish images of b-boys in the mass media (The Village Voice). In turn, breaking morphed into a spectator sport that Hollywood exploited then tossed aside when the fad peaked. Only the Europeans, then the Asians, carried the torch. More history and less championship would have made a great film even better. However, these are minor quibbles about a stunning movie.