"How She Move" is more sports movie than art movie in which stepping -- ensemble dancing to a hip-hop beat -- is the art/sport du jour. And the MVP is Raya (newcomer Rutina Wesley). Having reluctantly left her elite private school because her late sister's drug addiction sponged up the family's finances, Raya finds herself in her old, downtrodden Toronto 'hood, facing off with old nemeses including Michelle (Tre Armstrong) and trying to find a way back out.

The movie, which is burdened by a rather mediocre script by Annmarie Morais but boasts some terrific performances -- is not just a sports movie. It's a girls-can't-do-it/girls-can-do-it/girls-do-it/girls-beat-the-boys-at-it movie.

"How She Move" is a fascinating synthesis of the art it shoots and the art it makes. The African American step dancing that director Ian Iqbal Rashid captures in his film is to motion what rap is to music: It's aggressive, assertive, emphasizes beat over all else and actively resists the graceful or the traditionally beautiful (as rap does with melody). That intrinsic resistance makes rap, and stepping, inherently political, and the way Rashid films his dance sequences indicates that he's doing the same thing with his movie: He confines his characters visually and thus emphasizes their struggle within the frame, i.e., the power structure at hand.

This makes "How She Move" more intriguing as art than sport. Morais's dialogue contains too much exposition: We're told things in voice-overs that a more agile screenwriter would have worked into the story. The story itself is a hodgepodge of devices, conceits and half-baked motives, but amid the dissing and the dancing are affecting moments, usually quieter ones, between people at war who shouldn't be.

-- John Anderson (Jan. 25, 2008)

Contains drug content, suggestive material and profanity.