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Planet B-Boy
Directed by Benson Lee
Classification: 14A
Rating:

Well, we've seen documentaries that celebrate surfing and skateboarding and krumping from California, parkour from France and Capoeira from Brazil and Muay Thai from Thailand. But breakdancing? Give me a break.

The image of Bronx teenagers spinning on their heads to a boom-box beat feels locked in an early-eighties time capsule, along with English synth bands and images of Ronald Reagan with his shoe-polish hair dye. Of the four branches of hip-hop culture – rapping, graffiti, DJing and breakdancing – the last one would seem to have been assimilated into the culture and forgotten. Which, it turns out, is exactly wrong.

What's fun about Benson Lee's documentary Planet B-Boy isn't just the amazingly athletic displays of B-boys he puts on screen, but the film's sense of cultural discovery. Breakdance, though it faded as a novelty in American pop culture, went global and developed into an amazingly complex form. Like urban blues and rockabilly music in the early sixties, the form migrated and mutated, becoming a worldwide youth cultural phenomenon. Breakdancing found a hold in Europe from the early eighties as well as in Japan, and is still dramatically on the ascendant in South Korea.

In keeping with the formula of the niche-interest documentary such as Spellbound (2002), Lee introduces us to a collection of characters and then brings them together in a big competition. The focus is the 2005 Battle of the Year competition in Braunschweig, Germany, where promoter Thomas Hergenrother brings together international B-boys to celebrate the global reach of the dance form. Planet B-Boy isn't a history of the movement, but an instant cross-section of its current state.

Lee follows four national “crews” in the film: The Americans offer Knucklehead Zoo, a Latino crew from Vegas who reflect the showbiz style of their hometown. There's the amazing, synchronized Ichigeki crew from Japan; from rural South Korea, Last for One; and from the French suburbs, Phase T (France), a mixture of Arab and African French youth with one small, white 11-year-old. Various B-boy commentators offer background on the different national strengths: South Koreans for technical prowess, French for daring and intricacy, Japanese for choreographic innovation.

All this converges at the midpoint of the film, as each group puts on its best show. Lee doesn't show them in their entirety but the presentation is astute, allowing the viewer to see the moves from a front-row perspective, with gimmicky edits. The crew's presentations are followed by “battles” in which the teams face off against each other, and individual members take individual turns trying to out-dance, out-psych and out-dazzle their opponents to win the approval of the judges and the screaming 10,000 people in the audience.

Threaded through the dance sequences, Lee offers background interviews, focusing on the struggles of some of the individual dancers – rebel kids in their own cultures, without money or education, but with a fervent drive for recognition and a crew to share it with. The contrast with mainstream entertainment couldn't be starker: A Hollywood movie such as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull spends millions on computer technology to make some pretty ordinary actors look superhuman. Meanwhile, around the world, kids working with nothing but their bodies are creating far more startling effects. As one of the French dancers says, B-boy culture shows that “people who grew up with a minimum can achieve a maximum.”