Loosely based on the life of Iranian dancer Afshin Ghaffarian, this flat-footed drama about the transformative power of art is crippled by earnestness and clunky allegory. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, where dance is forbidden, we first meet Afshin as a dance-loving child. His mother, in a handy piece of exposition, gestures to a mob of suited goons: “Those men over there – they are the morality police.” Her point being that if Afshin must express himself through the medium of dance, he should do it behind closed doors.
Ten years later, Afshin (Reece Ritchie) finds a band of like-minded creatives at university in Tehran and decides to ride the wave of political and social optimism that coincides with the 2009 election and form a dance company. He is joined by beautiful, troubled Elaheh (Freida Pinto), who exercises her creative impulses by smoking heroin. It is montage heavy and toe-curlingly naive. However, as dance partners, Ritchie and Pinto have a certain physical chemistry.
