Hip-hoppers competing, communing

I'm not a huge fan of war. But if I have to watch a bunch of countries fighting, hands down, my preferred brand of combat is the hip-hop-dance battle.

It's like one ferociously choreographed dance in an NFL endzone, only here both teams act like they just scored a touchdown. Everybody's cocky. Everybody's keyed up. Everybody takes turns doing moves you hardly ever see at wedding receptions. The battles in Benson Lee's documentary

Planet B-Boy

are exceptional. The movie's not bad, either.

After introducing us to the dance form's top crews - from Japan, the United States, South Korea and France - it ships us off to Braunschweig, Germany, for 2005's Battle of the Year competition. But the fun begins well before we get there. Lee has lucked into five charismatic groups of poor and working-class young men (and by my count, one woman) - they're families, really. And while some of the individual dancers have great stories, the coolest thing about the nondance stuff in the movie involves the crews' appreciative characterizations of one another's styles.

Their analyses extend to the world of diplomacy. The Japanese turn revisionism into innovation. The Americans (a Latino crew from Vegas called Knucklehead Zoo) generate star power from individualism. The French dance more beautifully and intricately than everybody else (it's true).

The South Koreans are fast learners. They have a double entry in Battle of the Year because the reigning champs, Gamblerz from Seoul, get a bye, meaning no pesky nationals for them. The other team, Last for One, is a start-up from Hicksville. But they're electrifying.

Before Braunschweig, Lee plants the camera at street level and uses a vague fish-eye lens to take in the dancing the crews do in their respective locales. We sit in on rehearsals, hear a few of the dancers' personal histories, and behold some incredible gapped teeth. There is the impression that hip-hop dance can cure bigotry. The mother of Lil' Kev, the youngest, whitest member of the French crew, concedes that until her son started dancing with blacks and Arabs, she was a racist. Could b-boys bring world peace or financial stability next? Let's move Battle of the Year to Davos!

The Battle itself is presented more or less unto itself (19 teams, one winner, an audience of almost 10,000), suspenseful and culminating in a pair of one-on-one confrontations with four of the crews.

Planet B-Boy

isn't as rich or strange or moving as either

Paris Is Burning

or

Rize

. It's often too earnestly explanatory. But it looks great, and the dancing is the kind of stuff that would upstage the average pop star. Madonna, of course, is above average. So for me, the biggest suspense surrounding the movie isn't just which crew will win, but whether Madonna will have the good sense to call it up after it does.

Directed by Benson Lee. With Knucklehead Zoo. Distributed by Elephant Eye Films.

Running time:

1 hour, 38 mins.

Parent's guide:

No MPAA rating (profanity, smoking, adult themes)

Playing at:

Ritz at the Bourse