Early in the 1984 film Breakin’, a young white woman named Kelly Bennett drives to Venice Beach with her gay best friend to see a sidewalk performance by a crew of street dancers. She drives her convertible up onto the grass, throws her belongings in the back seat, and leaves her car there, unlocked and top down. It’s a minor detail in the film, but a telling one. Even though she is constantly warned of the dangers of this and other Los Angeles inner-city neighborhoods, Kelly instead finds the people friendly, accepting, and endlessly, essentially creative. It’s a place where everybody is too busy dancing or making music or painting murals to rifle through bags in an unlocked car. It is, the movie reveals, a kind of utopia, a depiction that is perhaps culturally naïve yet still powerful even 30 years later.
Breakin’ of course is the king of the breakdancing movies, a minuscule budget (less than $1 million) that ballooned into a true pop-cultural phenomenon. During its run in theaters, on HBO, and in the then-nascent home video market, the movie and its sequel had a generation obsessed with breakdancing, or street dancing, or social dancing. It was soon followed by a slew of imitators, including Beat Street (which Breakin’ had narrowly beat to the box office), Body Rock, and Fast Forward. But the Breakin’ saga remains the most popular in the small b-movie genre, perhaps because of the utopia it depicts. This is a Los Angeles defined by bright colors and vivid motions: dancers poppin’ and lockin’ in neon duds against a backdrop of clear blue skies, green palm trees, and vibrant graffiti murals. Compare that palette to the grays of Beat Street, which is set in New York City and might as well be shot in black-and-white. Sludge and snow seem to cover every surface, and every building is rundown and decaying. The actors huddle and shiver against the cold air, dancing as less as self-expression than as a means to keep warm. Who wouldn’t prefer sunny Venice Beach? Breakin’ offers neither an accurate nor a particularly nuanced portrayal of the neighborhood, but there is something powerful and attractive and weirdly defiant in its optimism: an extension of the politics of breakdancing.
Breakdancing was also known as social dancing, and it is the glue that holds the communities together in this pair of movies. Adolpho "Shabbadoo" Quiñones plays the male lead known only by his street name Ozone, and he is well cast: Born in Chicago but raised in Los Angeles, he helped to define and popularize the dance form as the leader of the Lockers, a pioneering crew made famous by their appearances on "Soul Train" and the short-lived NBC series "The Big Show". By the early 1980s, he was one of the most famous dancers in the country, choreographing music videos, appearing on Broadway with Bette Midler, and touring with Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson. Quiñones developed the idea for a movie about breakdancing and presented it to producer Menahem Golan, who co-founded Cannon Films to produce some of the cheesiest flicks of the decade, including Revenge of the Ninja, American Ninja, Ninja III: The Domination, and the Xanadu knockoff The Apple (which remains one of the best bad movies ever made).
Quiñones insists that Breakin’ was largely based on his own experiences in Los Angeles. "We were real street dancers," he told The Black Hollywood File back in 2008. "We weren’t something that was manufactured by Hollywood. We were real…It was like they just took a camera and followed us around…. So in that way I think the young kids in the inner city [and] around the world identified with that as being real." Another aspect that was real: the multicultural aspect of breakdancing. Especially for a low-budget b-movie, in retrospect Breakin’ seems progressive in its depiction of various races and demographics in Los Angeles, each contributing something vital to what would eventually coalesce into hip-hop culture.
Even if our point-of-view character is white, it is significant that it is a young woman instead of a young man (as in similarly plotted '80s b-movies like Footloose, Gleaming the Cube, and North Shore). As played by Lucinda Dickey (who showed off her martial arts chops in Ninja III: The Domination), Kelly Bennett becomes obsessed with street dancing and street culture because the community treats her as a viable member rather than as a sexual or commercial commodity. The boss at the diner continually harasses her; she is nearly raped by her dance instructor; and her agent wants her to sell out. But when she goes into the inner city, she finds only respectful artists who first and foremost admire her moves. The movie won’t commit to showing her in a mixed-race relationship with Ozone, but at least doesn’t depict her as a victim.
When Kelly drives out to Venice Beach, she is immediately invited to dance with Ozone and Turbo, her precise jetés appearing like a variation of breakdancing rather than a contrast to it. In this circle of poppers and lockers everyone is accepted: black, white, Hispanic, gay, straight, even physically disabled. Kelly’s best friend is a flamboyantly gay man named Adam, whom she nicknames Cupcakes, and while he does fit the bill as Gay Best Friend, the film affords him more agency and dignity than similar characters in, say, Mannequin.
In this version of inner-city Los Angeles, crime is mentioned only occasionally but never shown onscreen. The only real violence occurs on the dancefloor, when Ozone and Turbo face off against a rival duo. There are no spoken rules, but such is the code of breakdancing that the winners know when they’ve won and the losers know when they should duck out the back entrance. After losing their first battle, they recruit Kelly—who by now has her own street name, Special K—endure a rehearsal montage, christen themselves the TKO Crew, and finally win the rematch (which, it should be noted, is emceed by none other than Ice-T). No fist ever meets jaw, no kick makes contact; dance fight operates as a parody of action movies, all bug eyes and air punches.
Most of all, the inner city is never presented as something to escape or overcome. In fact, Kelly spends both movies attempting to join the community. "I have everything I want right here," says Ozone of his friends and neighbors, of his garage apartment, of his community. Even when they audition for a professional dance troupe, they do it explicitly as representatives of the street. The final scene (spoiler) shows them on Broadway, where they are presenting their own production based on life in Venice, and the camera makes sure to show every single minor character up on stage—not just Cupcakes and the requisite child dancers, but also the members of that rival crew. The triumph isn’t in leaving the neighborhood, but in bringing it with them.
Filmed and released just months after Breakin’, the justly maligned sequel only makes these themes more explicit. In Electric Boogaloo (named after one of Quiñones’ former crews), success has splintered the TKO Crew, with Turbo and Ozone returning to Los Angeles to teach kids how to breakdance at a synagogue-turned-community-center called Miracles. But a wealthy developer wants to knock the place down and build a luxury shopping mall, because malls in inner-city neighborhoods are guaranteed goldmines. In the middle of battling another rival crew and suffering through some tedious romantic drama, the newly reunited TKOs launch a gigantic stage show to pay off Miracles’ debts.
"What I find particularly interesting about Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo is that this story is about anti-gentrification, which is such a hot topic today," says Quiñones in the new commentary for Shout! Factory’s Blu-Ray edition (which includes both movies). "There’s a firestorm of controversy surrounding gentrification, and we did it! At its core, it’s a social movie… there’s something about keeping your culture, keeping your people together."
Whether or not this is an accurate depiction of Los Angeles is almost beside the point. These two movies may be silly and derivative, naïve in their politics and vague in their plotting, but their depiction of the inner city as a heaven for creativity and self-expression remains powerful and strangely compelling 30 years later. "With dance you save the community," remarks director Sam Firstenberg in the same commentary. The Breakin’ saga is a fantasy of race and culture and class in America, and as such it is all the more poignant since we know that subsequent depictions of these neighborhoods will be much gritty and more antagonistic once TKO has been displaced by another set of initials: NWA.