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'Rize' of a movement in motion

'Rize' — about a hyper-charged dance style invented by African American kids in South Central Los Angeles — is one of the year's most visually captivating, kinetic films, but also one of the most problematic.

Make no mistake, the movie's jaw-dropping array of motion and emotion hits you like a freight train. But when you let it simmer, problems start revealing themselves.

Lion's Gate Films 'Rize' 3 out of 5 stars Director: David LaChapelle Starring: Tommy the Clown Run time: 84 minutes Release date: June 24, 2005 Rating: PG-13 for suggestive content, drug references, language and brief nudity. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate "Rize"   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

For two years, mega-successful celebrity photographer and first-time feature director David LaChapelle — whose lushly stylized shoots you often see in Vanity Fair — tracked the fortunes of one Tommy Johnson, or "Tommy the Clown," a guy from South Central Los Angeles who fell into clowning when a friend was desperate for some children's birthday entertainment back in 1992, after the Rodney King verdict uprising rocked the city.

Combining a rainbow wig and white face paint with frenetic hip-hop dancing, Johnson flourished as an entertainer. The powerful moves caught on in the community, and soon "clown crews" of dancers were reappropriating motions as diverse as the "stripper dance" and police beatings and incorporating them into exceptionally fast routines.

Tensions mount when a breakaway faction of dancers turns the clown makeup into dramatic swoops of color that look more like warpaint and harden the moves into "krumping," which has become the default term for this kind of dancing. The movie culminates with "Battle Zone V," a dance-off held at Los Angeles' Great Western Forum between the clowns and the krumpers (krumpsters?) with names such as Swoop, Baby Tight Eyez, Miss Prissy and El Nino.

It speaks to the massive gap between white and black Los Angeles that this phenomenon, large enough to warrant a contest witnessed by thousands, stayed off the radar for so long. But after the shock of the new subsides, LaChapelle's limitations become painfully apparent. He clearly thinks the moves are just about the coolest thing he's ever seen, and who can blame him? The dancing is riveting, and LaChapelle keeps his urge toward eye-popping color and glossy visual surfaces to a merciful minimum.

But LaChapelle is no Michael Moore; emotionally, "Rize" is almost all surface. He seems to have little interest in building a context, other than one kid saying the dancing is great for people who don't like sports. It's implied that many of these dancers are church-going and krump to stay out of trouble, but we just don't learn enough about them as anything more than bodies in motion.

There are moments when the film implies that that inner-city tension gives rise to this sort of stylized expression. But LaChapelle's attempts at social commentary are ham-fisted (the revelation that Tommy's inner-city school is next to a discount casket store) or wildly misguided (a offhand comment from one of the kids that these sorts of moves are in the blood cuts to Africans dancing, a parallel that plays mighty close to inadvertent condescension). LaChapelle puts issues of race, class, white privilege and sexuality into play without giving them due weight or much consideration at all.

And in an understandable but utterly infuriating cost-cutting move, the music that the kids are actually dancing to is gone, replaced with some generic-sounding hip-hop commissioned for the film. It becomes impossible to tell if these kids are on the beat, ignoring it entirely, or what. It seems like a small thing, but as these dancers demonstrate, one misplaced rump shake can make the difference between winning and losing.