David LaChapelle graduates from MTV to the movie house with Rize.

By Johnny Ray Huston

CRITICS ARE LOATH to admit it, but MTV-to-movie trajectories still thrive: McG supersized himself via the Charlie's Angels franchise, while Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry continue to dive through mind holes. Lesser talents such as Brett Ratner (better off making Mariah Carey clips) and Marcus Nispel – whose Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake even failed as a Bush-era allegory – may have squandered their feature-length efforts, but garishly stylish David LaChapelle is a different breed of picture taker and picture maker, and his debut is a different kind of movie.

Simply put, LaChapelle's Rize privileges Watts over Hollywood. Or, to borrow a linguistic fusion used by someone in the movie, it brings the two together to form Hollywatts. A documentary exploration of new urban dance styles, Rize has greater kinetic energy and visual splendor than you're likely to find in this season's big-budget blockbusters. LaChapelle's framework is simple: He moves back and forth between personal story lines and adrenaline-pumping performance sequences, building toward a climactic stadium showdown between the House of Clown, led by pioneering dancer and neighborhood activist Tommy the Clown, and the newer wave of dancers – Krumpers – that have emerged from his influence.

LaChapelle's near name-alike Dave Chapelle has hit comic pay dirt playing up the fact that Lil Jon's "What!?" hollers are the closest hip-hop has come to minstrelsy, but – even though clowning and krumping involve powdered faces – it would be a major mistake to confuse Lil Jon's crunk with krump. More subculture than mere style, the latter harks back to a pre-bling era of street consciousness, and it does so with a sense of celebration lacking in those rare musical acolytes who've followed in the footsteps of Tupac. One of the most exciting things about Rize is its success at capturing and enhancing human feats of creation – more than once, a god-kissed sun ray beams down on the dancers as their cathartic movements accelerate against an electric-blue sky.

The dancers – in particular, a powerhouse named Miss Prissy – are amazing, from 300-pound-plus Big X to a little girl, all of four years old, throwing her coat on the floor with fierce concentration before wilding out. (Or a little boy krumper, picked up like a rag doll by teammates after a stadium victory.) LaChapelle has an eye for ghetto fab, vivifying teen bedrooms like House of Clown diva La Niña's, a shrine to Mickey Mouse with daisy coverlets. Krumping and clowning's face paint is even more ideally suited to the photographer turned director, who has never seen a cake-icing color he didn't want to intensify. Sporting three red balloons on one cheek and two on the other, Tommy the Clown has a distinctive approach to traditional clown makeup, but krump's posses bring fresher artistry to their faces, applying shades of green, blue, and red with airbrushed precision.

LaChapelle's film opens with clips of the Watts riots and then moves on to 1992 and the Rodney King trial's aftermath. The roof is on fire: Aerial views of flames no splash of water can put out illustrate one dancer's assertion that "we were just kids [then] ... we managed to grow from these ashes." The sociological shorthand is effective, though Rize ventures into iffier terrain later on, when LaChapelle juxtaposes krump battles with African tribal footage shot by Leni Riefenstahl. The link is so obvious that the gesture is unnecessary, and in drawing on Riefenstahl, LaChapelle opens a different ideological door beyond the already contentious one he's walked through.

When Susan Sontag unleashed a can of critical whoop-ass on Riefenstahl in Under the Sign of Saturn, the title of her essay, "Fascinating Fascism," pointed toward visible aesthetics. Yet today it's worth noting that the strength of Sontag's argument lies not so much in its rendering of visual material as in its meticulous exposure of Riefenstahl's lies about her past and how they related to her discourse about the People of the Nuba monograph. LaChapelle is another white European, but that's where his similarities to the more substantive and scary Riefenstahl end. LaChapelle's portraits don't construct ideals so much as celebrate personality, as illustrated by his peerless photo of a naked Eminem with a lit firecracker phallus.

If the whiff of suspect ethnography lingers, it's because Rize's closest corollary would have to be Jennie Livingston's study of vogueing, Paris Is Burning, which drew accusations of exploitation during its media moment. Livingston's 1989 movie possesses a thoroughness that LaChapelle's, glossing over sexual ambiguity, lacks. But Rize still presents the closest thing to a hero you're likely to find in the multiplex this year – and not just one, but two, three, four, or more of them. Alternately inspiring and vain, Tommy the Clown is the most complex figure here, yet others like Dragon and Miss Prissy (who illustrates the difference between Hollywood and South Central with two precise facial expressions) help the film achieve its title effect through sheer verbal candor and soulful physical expressiveness. Thanks to LaChapelle's facility for recognizing the pop appeal of folk artistry, the stars are out, even in LA's blazing sunshine.

'Rize' opens Fri/24 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.