Stiles' few movie roles may not yet have demonstrated a very wide range, but she remains appealing because she's nearly a contemporary archetype. As Ophelia in last year's "Hamlet," as she drove her bike through the streets of Manhattan in thrift-shop clothes, carrying her love letters in a funky box-like purse that seemed more suited to a child than a young woman, Stiles projected the particular mixture of attitude and inexperience coming off of the young art-school bohos who hang around downtowns.

With her wide forehead and small features, her impassive face and the screw-you delivery in her flat voice, Stiles can seem totally disaffected from whatever's going on around her. In "Save the Last Dance" Stiles uses just that affect to play possum. When she hands some B-boy back the bull he's been dishing her, and does it with the sort of timing that's so natural it doesn't catch until the rebound, you realize that Stiles has been alert all along, quietly registering everything going on around her. And when her tough-girl face dissolves into that big toothy grin and those deep dimples, her delight is infectious because it's so unexpected.

"Save the Last Dance" follows an utterly predictable course: Sara has to overcome her guilt and rediscover the joy of ballet; her new boyfriend, Derek (Sean Patrick Thomas), has to avoid the temptations of street life to start on his dream of becoming a pediatrician; Sara and her always-distant father, Roy, have to learn to love each other. There's never a moment when you doubt the characters will follow the course preordained for them in Duane Adler and Cheryl Edwards' script, and there's nothing particularly distinctive or imaginative in Thomas Carter's direction. Worse, when Derek begins to give Sara lessons in how to dance to hip-hop, Carter makes the usual stupid mistake of cutting up the dance scenes with editing so that we can't see the characters' whole bodies at one time -- a particularly unfortunate choice because Stiles, who has a dancer's build, moves gracefully.

	Save the Last Dance Directed by Thomas Carter Starring Julia Stiles, Sean Patrick Thomas, Kerry Washington, Terry Kinney View the "Save the Last Dance" movie trailer Print story E-mail story

So why bother with "Save the Last Dance"? Because for all its dumb clichés it offers the basic appeal of teen movies: the pleasure of watching kids be kids, acting as they do among themselves instead of how parents and teachers expect them to act. Sure, it's a Hollywood movie version of kids, but it doesn't feel unduly sanitized or sunshiny false. The banter and remarks that the characters toss back and forth with practiced familiarity, whether they're gabbing between classes or talking in the neighborhood club, have some of the unexpected comedy you hear listening to kids mouthing off to each other on the subway or outside a convenience store after school.

That's why the subplot involving Derek's buddy Malakai (Fredro Starr), who's slipping into living out the gangsta life, is so unnecessary; it feels like a sop to some exec's idea of urban reality. Those parts have a way of contradicting so many of the offhand, nicely nonjudgmental moments, like when Sara uses a fake I.D. so she can go clubbing with her new friends, or Derek's sister Chenille's (Kerry Washington) infant boy, or a fight in a club that makes everyone split because the cops will hassle whoever they find hanging around.

One thing the movie doesn't shrug off, and where it shows some genuine guts, is in its take on black prejudice toward interracial relationships. By the time the movie's villainess (Bianca Lawson), who has designs on Derek, slits her eyes at Sara and initiates a cat fight, you've expected the blowup. It catches you completely by surprise when Chenille, who has become Sara's best girlfriend, turns on Sara for taking one of the few good black men around, and for acting like nobody's bothered by it. Last year I did a piece for Salon bemoaning the dearth of interracial relationships in movies and television. Almost all of the angry letters I got were from black women telling me how tired they were of seeing black men with white women, both on screen and in real life. There was honest hurt in those letters. The women who wrote me said they felt that black men who had white girlfriends or wives were telling black women that they weren't attractive enough or classy enough for them. Those are some of the same arguments that Chenille makes to Sara. And "Save the Last Dance" has the nerve to stand up to them, to say that finally, hurt feelings and low self-esteem are as lousy a reason as any for suggesting that people should "stay with their own kind."

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