Save the Last Dance

Save the Last Dance is a 2001 American dance film, directed by Thomas Carter. It stars Julia Stiles and Sean Patrick Thomas as a teenage interracial couple in Chicago who work together to help Stiles's character train for a Juilliard School dance audition. It was produced by MTV Films.

Save the Last Dance was released in the United States on January 12, 2001, by Paramount Pictures. It received mixed reviews from critics, and grossed $132 million on a $13 million budget. A direct-to-video sequel, Save the Last Dance 2, was released in 2006.

Plot

Seventeen-year-old Sara Johnson, a promising ballet dancer in suburban Chicago, hopes to be admitted to the Juilliard School and implores her mother to attend the audition. She fails the audition and soon learns that her mother was killed in a car accident on her way to get to it.

Sara is wracked with guilt and gives up ballet. She moves to the South Side to live with her estranged father Roy, a relatively unsuccessful jazz musician, who plays the trumpet at nightclubs. Sara transfers to a majority-black high school, where she is one of a handful of white students. She quickly befriends Chenille Reynolds, a teenage single mother who is having relationship problems with her ex-boyfriend Kenny.

Chenille invites Sara to a dance club called Stepps, where she has her first experience dancing to hip hop rhythms. At Stepps, she dances with Derek, Chenille's brother. Derek is studious and responsible, something rare in his community. He dreams of attending Georgetown University and eventually becoming a pediatrician. Derek likes Sara, and decides to help her develop her dancing abilities by incorporating more hip hop into her style.