Groove

Updated June 26, 2020 | Infoplease Staff

Released by Sony Pictures Classics, Groove is actually an homage to the ecstatic and squirrelly ephemera surrounding every all-night rave. The ensemble cast includes a variety of youth at various stages of experience and engagement with technoid culture. Impressively, they all verge on caricatures but don't quite fall into that trap. It's so perfect because ravers tend to be caricatures themselves; the pacifiers and Tickle-Me Elmo backpacks joked about here being just two symbols of a subculture where infantilization is often the “in” look.

Groove takes place over the course of a single evening in San Francisco. Writer-director-editor Greg Harrison constructs it with a relaxed insider's perspective. In one scene, a nervous partygoer is offered two unusual pills by an unknown woman. He quickly declines. Nonplused, she proceeds to plugs her ears with the pills. The acting is decent, and the whole affair is understated to a refreshing insiderly degree, down to encouraging responsible drug use rather than uninformed moralizing or championing stylish hedonism.