Swing Kids Review

The premise is a trap and the picture walks straight into it, asking whether dancing to banned American records counts as resistance in a register where the answer can only be yes. Hamburg in 1939 gets a backlot gloss, the teenagers talk in American high school idiom, and the Hitler Youth are staged as a rival clique, so the stakes stay social rather than lethal until Frank Whaley's Arvid, the one performance with no vanity in it, forces the issue with his wrists.

Christian Bale is the reason to sit through it. His Thomas starts as the loudest boy in any room and hardens by degrees into someone who believes the uniform, and Bale plays that conversion as appetite rather than tragedy, which is much more frightening than the screenplay seems to want. Robert Sean Leonard has the nominal lead and almost no interior life to work with, and Barbara Hershey's mother exists to be a plot mechanism.

Thomas Carter shoots the dance floors with genuine attack, bodies thrown overhead, camera down at shoe level, then cuts to scenes that explain themselves twice over. The closing cry of Swing Heil is meant as defiance and registers as a shrug.