While director Thomas Carter ("Metro," "Swing Kids") does not portray the mostly African-American Chicago neighborhood as the most desirable place to bring up a baby or to go to school, the youngsters seem anything but oppressed. The ghetto high school is savored for the most part by young people who are alive, vibrant, and involved in the one class discussion that we witness (about Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" as taught by a hip black instructor who is on his pupils' wave length). While nothing in "Save the Last Dance" could be called an innovation in the genre, the film delivers a marvelous performance by the talented Julia Stiles, who seems to be competing with Helen Hunt for each year's most prolific actress.

Stiles performs here in the role of a talented woman heavily involved in ballet, whose world crashes around her when her mother dies in a highway accident. She is compelled to give up her spiffy suburban existence and move into a mostly black neighborhood with her father, Roy (Terry Kinney), who had abandoned the family some time back and who ekes out a precarious living as a jazz trumpeter. Attending the local school, she meets a bright, seventeen- year-old African-American student, Derek Reynolds (Sean Patrick Thomas), who awaits word about his application to Georgetown University and who has dreams of becoming a pediatrician. Each enters the other's milieu, although Sara learns quite a bit more about the hip-hop generation than Derek absorbs about the world of ballet and contemporary dance.

The scenes that will probably get the teens in the audience giggling involve Derek's tutoring of Sara in the culture of young blacks: how to sit, slouched over, legs wide; how to shake your butt on the dance floor; how to deliver the dozens. Derek's lessons are supplemented by his sister Chenille's advice to Sara on how to dress to avoid looking "country." Older members of the audience might wonder why Sara would want to take on the unique polish of the African- American since, after all, shouldn't one want to be herself as the movie's tagline indicates?

The film benefits mightily from the performance of Sean Patrick Thomas as Derek. His chemistry with Ms. Stiles is palpable, convincing. Side characters do not fare as well, as Derek's friends Malakai (Fredro Starr), involved in drugs, Snookie (Vince Green), and the woman who envies and dislikes Sara's incursions into her community, Nikki (Bianca Lawson), are mere caricatures. Nor are Peter E. Berger's MTV-style editing of Stiles' dances conducive to more than a headache, though presumably the fast cuts are necessary since Stiles is not a professional dancer. Overall, "Save the Last Dance" profits from well-developed principals, an vigorous sound track provided by Mark Isham, and a feel for the grit and warmth alike of an otherwise impoverished neighborhood.