GROOVE IS A BAD MOVIE. Fortunately, a movie like this one--a movie about a scene, an urban subculture--works better if it is bad. Iain Chambers pointed out this paradox in his book Popular Culture, when discussing the 1984 film Beat Street, noting, "The thin plot of the film probably helps rather than hinders its presentation of the Bronx and hiphop culture. You get to see Grandmaster Flash, the Treacherous Three, Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation, and lots of breakdancing." The same dynamic is at work in Groove: Through the simplistic and transparent plots--a heartbreaking love triangle between two guys and girl; an uptight yuppie discovering his "inner cool guy," and so on--we get to see the components and codes of a San Francisco rave. We see the way it is set up, the way it is advertised, the types of drugs the ravers consume, the way rave DJs "move the crowd" (in the Rakim sense), and, most importantly, we hear real rave music. In this respect, the film is a success!

The failure of the film is in the very fact that it exists at all. Cultures typically declare themselves only at the time of their death, and so it is with Groove. It is not so much a celebration as an epitaph. Groove "declares" the death of San Francisco's rave scene (if not San Francisco altogether) in the same way that Johnny Mnemonic declared the death of cyberpunk (and Tokyo).

Part of the reason for this death is illustrated in a seemingly insignificant incident early in the movie, when a portly cop arrives at a warehouse and asks a rave organizer what is going on. The organizer claims he's throwing a party for an Internet startup. The fact is, the types of spaces that make large-scale raves possible (abandoned warehouses in de-industrialized sections of the inner city) are now being bought up by small and large hi-tech companies. Bereft of its habitat, rave culture will wither and die. So even if the movie seems happy, light, and insouciant, it is actually funereal; and like all funerals, watching it makes you feel all sad inside.