Get Into the Groove: The Best Party Film You Haven’t Heard Of
By Adesola Thomas
In celebration of its 25th anniversary, Adesola Thomas dives deep into the euphoric appreciation of the rave scene as captured in director Greg Harrison’s criminally underseen
Groove.
Sometimes the petite grief of knowing I’ll never see every movie I might love surfaces. But that lamentation dissolves when I remember the equal and opposite truth: For all of us, any day now, something alchemical will transpire. Maybe at your local cinema or in your living room, you’ll watch a film for the first time and it will stay with you forever.
For me this film is Groove, Greg Harrison’s outstanding and criminally underappreciated San Francisco–set rave picture, which celebrated its 25th anniversary last month. I discovered the Sony Pictures Classics title when sifting through the ‘party’ category on Tubi one evening a few years back. Ten minutes into the feature’s sleek 86-minute runtime, I knew. And not simply because Hamish Linklater spent the majority of his debut big-screen performance in a partially unbuttoned oversized shirt. Although as Maya remarks, “Did anyone else enjoy Hamish Linklater’s open shirt? I thought Hamish Linklater’s open shirt was lovely.”
Groove opens on a motley crew of cigarette-smoking rave collective members, clandestinely finalizing party logistics in an abandoned warehouse garage the night before a renegade. Crouched over building blueprints, they discuss the proximity of the map point to a local police precinct from which Sergeant Channahon (baby-faced Nick Offerman), unbeknownst to them, will ultimately crash their party. They then decide what time they’ll zhuzh up the space with water bottles, video art and a free fruit spread.
Before launching into a quintessentially new millennia opening title sequence outfitted with dial-up and floppy disks, cinematographer Matthew Irving pushes in on rave collective leader Ernie (Steve Van Wormer), who declares to his peers debonairly that there are “no obstacles … only challenges.” It’s the clever type of dialogue that does the dual work of launching us into this subcultural world while demystifying what kind of elusive bodies plan secret parties. These are no boogeymen. They’re metropolitan kids who want to find somewhere illegal (re: intriguing) to dance to electronic music. My, do they dance.
Harrison peppers the film with sweat-soaked dance sequences where people move their bodies with abandon. Characters in Groove earnestly move, often beneath mesmerizing cerulean and blood-orange gel lights. The aura of the film, especially on the dance floor, is visually kindred to the otherworldly technicolor California of Gregg Araki’s Nowhere, the concluding chapter of his teen apocalypse trilogy. Connie agrees, citing Groove as, “Nowhere without Araki.” Rachel True even appears in both films. In Nowhere she’s Mel, our brooding protagonist’s bisexual girlfriend who flits around LA with her lesbian lover, Lucifer (Kathleen Robertson). In Groove she’s Beth, a former babysitter and seasoned raver whom we follow among a cast of characters.
Groove foregoes the self-referential cheek of party subculture movies like 24 Hour Party People and the boyish debauchery of a Project X. Harrison’s youth-culture rave picture captures the affinity people experience at underground parties. He shot the film in San Francisco in 24 days, maintaining his vision of a ‘celebration of scene’ he intended for Groove, as opposed to the drug-induced, teen shoot-’em-up that the LA producers to whom he first pitched the idea wanted it to be.
When Harrison screened this debut feature at the Sundance Film Festival in 2000, there wasn’t exactly a dearth of tween-twentysomething party films. Go, Doug Liman’s crime comedy rave-set picture released just the year before, and contained hallmarks of late ’90s and early ’00s American party movies: a sunny ska and big beat–peppered soundtrack (hello, Fatboy Slim) and an ensemble of beloved character actors. Timothy Olyphant, Katie Holmes at the peak of Dawson’s Creek fanfare, and James Duval (another Arakiverse dreamboat) appear among a cast of rising stars. But Liman’s feature is far more preoccupied with the shadowy characters and illicit drug syndicates wafting through rave culture. His film is largely indifferent to the luminous dancefloor or spinning DJ decks that fill its frames. Liman leans into the shoot-’em-up.
Modern classics like the House Party trilogy and Can’t Hardly Wait use the house party’ as a backdrop to flirt with their own peripheral teenage woes. In House Party, Kid (Christopher Reid) and his friend Play (Christopher Martin) are grounded, and have parents to thwart in order to make it to their function. Can’t Hardly Wait and even 10 Things I Hate About You use the party as a tool to get a spectrum of pubescent archetypes in the same room. Sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, wasteoids, dickheads. You get it.
Where else will Ethan Embry pester—I mean, profess his love to—bombshell Jennifer Love Hewitt before graduation, if not the quintessential high school party? Where else but Bogey Lowenstien’s (Kyle Cease) kitchenette rager could Kat Stratford (Julia Stiles) drunkenly dance to ‘Hypnotize’?
In these pictures, parties and sometimes raves are scaffolding for other ideas. They’re gatherings to sneak off to or crash, the X-spot on a map of youthful willpower and defiance, a carrot of courage for unruly kids keen to escape musky suburban bedrooms. But Greg Harrison doesn’t characterize the warehouse rave as some restricted destination or confectionary backdrop. Raves are the revered centerpiece of his film’s world, the place admittedly older characters seek catharsis and face few limitations. Like electronic-music documentary Modulations before it, Groove possesses an almost archival quality. The film catalogues the importance that its fictionalized dance space carries for participants.
Harrison successfully uses cinema to simulate the embodied experience of being at a party well into the wee hours of the morning. His capacity to transmute the ephemerality of a rave to fixed 35mm film merits entry into the zeitgeist. The only other undeniably simulative party films I have seen are UK rave picture
Beats, and of course Steve McQueen’s Small Axe feature
Lovers Rock.
Both of these films weave in lingering recurring sequences where the picture absorbs you. Suddenly you’re there, in a sea of precious people. You are a party guest squeezing past grinding lovers on the way to a chaise lounge or a smoker’s balcony. For Harrison, offering realism without hubristically inserting his own biography into a dynamic scene may emerge from his first-hand experience.
From the mid-’90s onward, Harrison frequented underground Bay Area raves thrown by collectives like Cloud Factory and Friends and Family. With his connection to the scene and inclusion of real DJs like Digweed, Polywog and DJ Forest Green, Harrison cinematizes with an authenticity and confidence that might otherwise be diluted by a simplistic fetishism of rave culture. There’s a carefulness to his world-building that feels reminiscent of Party Girl, a film that stretches outside the confines of its rave space, yet still visualizes that space as self-evidently legitimate. Necessary. Worthwhile. Mary (Parker Posey) living to party isn’t merely a wayward lack of focus. Parties are where she sees her friends; they’re what she gets to dress up for.
In
Groove, Harrison introduces you to a spectrum of ravers: the aforementioned party organizers, equipment savants, stoners, vinyl-spinning DJs, seasoned partiers, first-timers, body-art enthusiasts. There’s a running gag in the film where Neil (Jeff Witzke) and his boyfriend try to celebrate their one-year anniversary by seeing Digweed spin. Because Guy (Dmitri Ponce) messes up the maps, they never make it to the party. By meeting this array of characters, audiences are given multiple, simultaneous vantage points from which to enter the rave. They are reminded that there is no archetypal party attendee, just people.
Colin (Denny Kirkwood) and Harmony (Mackenzie Firgens), tumultuously coupled ravers, drag Colin’s computer-nerd brother David (Hamish Linklater) to his first rave. In the chill room, David connects with Leyla (Lola Glaudini), a New York transplant and party girl with whom he falls in love during his first ecstasy trip. During my favorite sequence in the film, Leyla, David, Harmony, Colin and Beth enjoy the soft and oblong decor and candy raver sticker collections in the chill room. Incredibly happy and high, David announces his home address to everyone in the room and insists they come over for breakfast the next morning. Then, so earnestly, he says, “Thank you all for being here, really.” In the story’s sunset, rave newbie David ultimately gives collective leader Ernie ‘the nod,’ a coveted gesture of gratitude for taking the risk of planning a renegade at all.
Cliff (Ari Gold), a chemistry TA and the rave’s primary substance provider, vocalizes the film’s harm reductionist perspective. When packaging his ‘goods’ at home, Cliff resists his friend Todd’s (Angelo Spizzirri) characterization of drugs as tools to “fuck [yourself] up.” Cliff insists, “If you’re going to be a successful drug user you’ve gotta be well informed.” Later, Beth supports a teen she used to babysit after an overdose, reminding him not to take drugs on an empty stomach.
By including David's elation, the non-fatal overdose, and Cliff’s street economy, Harrison facilitates a nuanced conversation about an element of party culture that is often stigmatized or glamorized in movies. What works about Groove isn’t merely its affecting portrayal of a seldom depicted world, but Harrison’s commitment to creating a complex ensemble of engaging characters who gather around the maypole that is PLUR (peace, love, unity and respect). With Groove, Harrison isn’t trying to sell you a fantasy about some beat-heavy, utopian underworld. Conflict emerges at the rave. People spar as they tend to do. But through his narrative, it is clear that he firmly understands the transformative power parties can have, how they help people return to themselves, how they make life more liveable.
MJSays concurs: “There ain’t nothing quite like rave culture—and when I say ‘rave culture,’ I don’t mean something like Coachella or Burning Man, where wide-brim hipster hats and Instagram egos take up most of the dancefloor—I’m talking about those now-forgotten underground parties hidden away in industrial warehouses or isolated pine forests, where bottled water was the highest currency, freedom of expression reigned and getting lost in the music was always the sole objective of the night.”
In March, Atlanta’s Audio Video Club asked me to program a film for Cinelogue, their cinema and dialogue series. Surprise, surprise: I chose Groove. The night opened with an interactive exhibit about the film outfitted with printed behind-the-scenes stills, copies of the raver’s manifesto, bubbles, citrus fruit, flowers. After we screened the movie, local DJs spun off vinyl and USB drives for a dancing crowd of attendees. What moved through the space wasn’t just a collection of house heads and giddy, sweaty Southern cinephiles. There was an aftertaste of casual sublimity, the seedlings of Greg Harrison’s cinematic efforts still coming into bloom after a quarter of a century, the succor of experiencing something new in the transcendent presence of strangers.
To my delight, as the subwoofers were loaded up and chairs folded, a few people thanked me for screening the film and attested that they’d tell their friends, roommates, co-workers, and lovers about it too.
On departing they gave me the nod.
And I nodded back.
