Groove: Movie, DVD Review (2008)

Written and directed by Greg Harrison, 86 minutes, rated R.

With its infectious soundtrack, thrill-seeking characters and thin, Ecstasy-fueled script, Greg Harrison’s 2000 movie, “Groove,” isn’t interested in spinning a good story. It’s interested in capturing the essence of attending a rave--which, in this case, features hundreds of stoned kids twirling about on a makeshift dancefloor while the tiny melodramas of their lives slam into them like anvils.

Unlike such angst-ridden films as “Loser” and “The In Crowd,” “Groove” puts a different face to Generation Y, exposing them not as an angry, disenfranchised lot lacking in love or, for that matter, evil to the core, but as euphoric, happy-go-lucky drug users who love to love each other, baby--especially while tripping on a dance floor.

In making the film, Harrison says his intention “was to evoke the community found in the subculture of raves. I was also interested in exploring the ambiguous morality surrounding relationships and drug use as well as the universal desire of people to belong and feel connected, however successful or unsuccessful each person’s attempt is.”

Harrison himself is only modestly successful in pulling this off.

His film’s opening, set to a driving techno score, begins with an anonymous group of techno-savvy twentysomethings logging onto computers and hopping into chatrooms to spread the word about the latest rave, which is set to take place illegally at an abandoned warehouse in San Francisco.

It’s the most interesting part of the movie, a crisply edited 15 minutes that provides insight into the sheer skill and daring it takes to organize one of these events.

The characters, however, are about as interesting as anything on “The Lawrence Welk Show”; they’re meaningless to Harrison and to us. As likable as some of these club kids are, most are vapid and none ever rise above stereotype. Harrison is too content to use them as movable set pieces that occasionally O.D.

There’s David (the horrible Hamish Linklater), a tense, lonely writer of PC manuals who predictably loosens up and comes into his own at the rave; there’s Leyla Heydel (Lola Glaudini), a bright, knowing New Yorker who helps David through his first trip on Ecstasy; and David’s brother, Colin (Denny Kirwood), who proposes to his girlfriend, Harmony (Mackenzie Firgens), on the very night he also decides to make out with a man.

To those who frolicked in the drug culture of ‘60s, ‘70 and even ‘80s, much of this will seem pretty benign, tame stuff, but the film nevertheless has merit as a cult feature and it does, at the very least, offer its intended audience of present and past clubbers an ending some should identify with.

Indeed, as the ravers come slipping out of the warehouse and into the dawn with their jaws clenched from popping too many drugs, their makeup smeared and clothes rumpled from too much sex, their glassy eyes wincing into the sunlight, an embarrassing truth is once again proved true: There’s nothing quite like nighttime glamour in a daytime world.

Grade: B-