Galvanic subculture gives new lease of life to humdrum / impoverished / politically oppressed locale: a trusty documentary template from Dogtown and Z-Boys to This Ain’t California. Nottingham in the 1980s gets the rad-lift in this sweet but baggy retrospective about how breakdancing briefly turned East Midlands suburbia into beat street. Contextually hazy, it touches on transatlantic black culture, racism and Thatcherite Britain without nailing any of these – nor does it make links to the city’s thriving contemporary hip-hop scene. Where NG83 does score is in wry but tender thumbnail sketches of a handful of ageing B-boys: having tea with their mums, bunkered inside walls of collectibles, or in the tragic case of one, found dead in a park aged 41. As his old lady frets about his drinking and joblessness, another veteran protests that if you go around Nottingham, Sheffield or Derby, “Say, ‘Do you know Dancing Danny?’, and they’ll all say, ‘Yeah!’” But if there’s sadness, there’s English eccentricity, too, and a noble refusal to give up on hip-hop’s creed of fierce self-reliance. These blinged-up Quixotes aren’t tilting at windmills, but performing them.
