Wild Style 40

A Defining Film for a Defining Era

There are certain films that become outliers for their cult status, films that can be esoteric as well as universally appealing. If searching for an era, city, or cultural convergence to equal the massive historical clout of the late 1970s and early 1980s New York City, one might have to go back to the Lost Generation of Paris in the 1920s. Those years in NYC are pivotal for a myriad of reasons, not all of them art, but to look at the impact of hip-hop, graffiti, punk, break-dancing, club culture, uptown, and downtown colliding is to recognize that moment in history as a sort of BC versus AD of influential expressions. And if you need a film to help anchor the latter stages of the era, Charlie Ahearn’s independent and inventive Wild Style is your visual vocabulary.

“Wild Style was not a documentary,” Ahearn told me over email recently. “It had to tell a story, and it had to be real. In the summer of 1980, trains were the cutting edge of modern art, such as FUTURA’s abstract Break car and FAB 5 FREDDY’s Campbell Soup homage to Andy Warhol. Graffiti writers were talking about wildstyle, a highly personalized lettering meant to be hard to decipher, full of sweeping blades and arrows, and the name ‘Wild Style’ seemed to fit the movie like a glove.”