Wild Style provides a low-budget, true-to-the-art vehicle for graffiti writers, break-dancers, rap artists and deejays, all portrayed as the wild characters they are in the South Bronx setting where they initiated “hip-hop,” which has fast become the dominant culture of New York City's black teenagers. In a loose fictional narrative that benefits from director Charlie Ahearn's documentary background, the film also captures another New York phenomenon, the attempt of the middle class art world to lasso this culture for its own purposes. The story revolves around Raymond, by day a gawky, almost mild-mannered Bronx teenager, by night the mysterious Zoro, who darts around sleepy subway stations, decorating cars in the dark. For this film, which reflects reality in every aspect of its fictional plot, graffiti artist George “Lee” Quinones had to be coaxed out of his own preferred anonymity to play Raymond; Sandra “Pink” Fabara, whose romance with Quinones is local legend, plays his girlfriend Lady Bug; Patti Astor, the exhibitor/agent who brought hip-hop culture to Manhattan's Fun Gallery, plays a trendy, tenacious uptown reporter.
Featuring phenomenal break-dance sequences and rappers--including Grandmaster Flash, Chief Rocker Busy Bee and others, Wild Style is an entirely contemporary film musical. Its aesthetic roots in such films as The Harder They Come and Shirley Clarke's The Cool World, set it apart from several Hollywood studio productions now in the works on the same subject. (Featured in 1983 at Filmex, the Toronto Film Festival and the Museum of Modern Art's New Directors Series.)