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Bouge De Là! | A French breakdancing crew does a flip in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower in Planet B-Boy.

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS
Directed by Aaron Rose. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel). Oct. 11-15.
**

PLANET B-BOY
Directed by Benson Lee. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel). Oct. 11-15.
****

Beautiful Losers follows a once-obscure bunch of DIY artists from the early ’90s who used to hang out at the now-famous Alleged Gallery in New York, owned by curator-turned-filmmaker Aaron Rose. Rose’s film is not a documentary about what does or doesn’t qualify as art, nor does it ask or answer any questions about how art changes at the same beat as society. Instead, Rose follows these artists — future success stories like propaganda parodist Shepard Fairey, Thumbsucker director and visual artist Mike Mills, and skateboarding prodigy turned photographer and painter Ed Templeton — as each one describes their upbringings, influences, and philosophy of art.

Unfortunately, they don’t do it very well. It’s strange how a group of talented people talking about their artistic development could say so much and have it mean so little to the audience. Beautiful Losers comes off as shallow at best, narcissistic at worst.

Like so many documentaries about art, Beautiful Losers fails to show art in artistic ways. Displaying artwork onscreen and interpreting it via talking-head soundbites is not exactly a cinematic approach, especially when it’s accompanied by slow, melodic and almost numbing music.

But Rose’s style isn’t the film’s only flaw. After a while, you realize that it’s the artists themselves who are the problem: skaters, hip-hop heads, punks, painters, and filmmakers who grew up as outsiders and became famous once society began to accept their style. That’s not to say I think they’re sellouts, because I don’t — I admire that their love for art is what made them successful. But they never more than superficially touch on why they think society began to accept them, and they do so in increasingly self-important ways. Instead of demonstrating to aspiring artists that art can come from anywhere, Beautiful Losers feels more like a group of “insiders” telling the world how awesome they are.

If Beautiful Losers is about a group of artists expressing a similar type of inspiration in different ways, then Planet B-Boy (which also screens at Metro Cinema this weekend) is about a group of artists expressing a variety of motivations in one specific way: breakdancing.

Benson Lee’s documentary follows breakdancing crews from all over the world (Japan, South Korea, France, as well as the United States) as they compete in an annual international competition known as Battle of the Year. It’s like watching America’s Best Dance Crew on a much larger scale, and at a much deeper level.

Where Beautiful Losers focuses on artists instead of art, Planet B-Boy does a great job of conveying not just what hip-hop culture is all about, but how that culture varies depending on what part of the world you’re coming from. Right from the first five minutes, Lee gets to work educating the audience about the different styles that each country brings to b-boying, and what makes it a legitimate form of artistic expression.

The crews themselves are incredibly diverse, and while they all share a love of hip-hop, many of them also use dance as a way to rebel against their societies. One crew from South Korea, for example, is called Last for One, because it’s the last time the team will be able to compete before their government conscripts them into the military. Other crews do it to legitimize themselves in the eyes of their families, to prove they can be successful without having to be doctors or professors. Societal and familial impressions play a huge part in the development of each crew’s style, and Lee does a great job of conveying that fact without the film ever getting overbearing.

Planet B-Boy has the big, beating heart that Beautiful Losers is missing. You can’t help but root for each one of these crews, all of whom are motivated by dreams that anyone can relate to, no matter how unathletic. It’s an entertaining documentary that will leave you with a new perspective on what makes a b-boy tick.