“SAVE THE LAST DANCE” IS LOWKEY WEIRD TO WATCH 25 YEARS LATER

Save the Last Dance, which hit theaters on January 12, 2001, has all the ingredients of an early-2000s teen movie that knew exactly what it was doing. Ballet. Hip-hop. A tragic backstory. A romance built on lingering looks and shared headphones. A soundtrack that does most of the emotional heavy lifting. Watching it now, it’s easy to remember why it landed the way it did.

The premise is straightforward. The movie follows Sara Johnson (played by Julia Stiles, fresh off 10 Things I Hate About You success), the best ballerina in her small Illinois town. So says her closest friend and personal cheerleader. But Sara’s sights are set much higher than Midwestern community auditoriums—she wants Julliard. But on the day of her big audition, Sara’s mom is killed in a car accident, plunging her into a world of guilt, confusion and … um ... cultural appropriation.

Sent to live with her thus-far-disinterested father, Roy, in urban (ahem, Black) Chicago, the very white Sara has a lot to learn. With gutsy, mature-beyond-her-years teen mom Chenille Reynolds (played by Kerry "It's Handled" Washington) tutoring her in black street chic (“slammin’,” not “cool”; spaghetti straps, not button-ups from The Gap), Sara learns how to protect herself, where not to walk at night and how to be down. She also falls in love with Chenille’s brainy brother, Derek (played by Sean Patrick Thomas), who, among other things, teaches her hip-hop, prepping her for the crowd at Steps, a night club hangout where Sara must prove herself to her new peers.

Caught in two very different sets of circumstances, Sara and Derek push each other to rise above. She needs a reason to pursue ballet in spite of her grief and regret over her mother’s death. He needs the courage to walk away from his “thuggin’” pal Malakai and go after Georgetown and med school. Adding the social pressure of an interracial relationship complicates matters for both, but it’s their honesty and care for each other that drives them to break out of oppressive environments, both external and self-imposed.

It’s the kind of story Hollywood has always liked: grief softened by love, talent unlocked by proximity, personal growth measured by institutional approval. Familiar enough to feel comforting. Clean enough to feel safe.

And yet, watching in 2026 made me feel kinda uncomfy. Just a little.

Stepps Ain't No Square Dance.

From the outside, Save the Last Dance reads like a classic crossover movie. In practice, it feels more like a Black film that happens to revolve around a white protagonist. The world of the movie—the music, the language, the attitude—is unmistakably Black.

I don't think it was director Thomas Carter's (best known for Coach Carter) intention to portray the inner-city school as a Hollywood nightmare of black ghetto life—scary baby daddies, gansta tension, soups jelly Black girls. But his attempt to key into the tough every-day realities of contemporary public school life feels like a check list of Black stereotypes nonetheless, despite the director himself being a Black man.

As our conversations about diversity and inclusion have evolved, the film’s “I don’t see color” approach feels sanded down. And because it’s been memed enough, I feel very comfortable saying this: Sara’s final audition for Juilliard is some amateur bullshit. (Bless the TikTok users who’ve re-created Sara’s climactic audition).

The film's emphasis on no good very bad Black people vs the sweet, wide-eyed white girl really comes into focus when you realize Sara retains her innocent shock throughout the entire film. She never truly comes to understand the world she's currently inhabiting. She doesn't need to. She's just passing through the ghetto. She's not here to stay.

We Spend More Time Defending Our Relationship Than Actually Having One.

Save the Last Dance, however, isn't a story about race relations in America. It's a romance, with race as a backdrop. Our two swoonees meet cute during an English class discussion of Richard Wright versus Truman Capote that wouldn't be out of place at Columbia University. Or Finding Forrester. The conversation, if feels, is solely meant to prove that Derek is smart enough for Sara.

Friction being attraction, Derek can’t resist asking Sara out on the dance floor at the hot local club, Steps, but it’s quickly clear that Sara doesn’t know her hip from her hop. It’s just as clear that the script by Duane Adler and Cheryl Edwards will serve up characters who are here simply as blunt obstacles for Derek and Sara to overcome: For him, it’s his best friend, gangsta-in-training Malakai (played Fredro Starr, better known to me as the bad boy boyfriend in Moesha), Mercutio to Derek’s Romeo; for her, it’s obnoxious Nikki (played by Bianca Lawson, a woman so stunning I'm kinda pissed about it), who recently dumped Derek and considers Sara a one-woman threat to black women everywhere.

What makes the film a hard watch for me now is hard the film hammers that Derek is "one of the good ones". In fact, he's the only good one in the movie. He's not violent, gang-affiliated, brain-dead, or a dead-beat. He's smart, kind, tender, and has aspirations. He's not like other Black boys. And this idea that he's the one exception doesn't quite sit right with me.

That framing—Derek as the exception—is doing more work than the movie ever acknowledges. He exists as proof of concept. Proof that Black masculinity can be legible, palatable, and occasionally aspirational. He's proof that Sara’s attraction to him isn't reckless, naïve, or dangerous. He’s her (and the audiences) reassurance.

Watching now, it’s hard not to notice how much emotional labor is required of him. Derek is endlessly patient. He listens. He mentors. He encourages. He believes in Sara’s talent before she fully remembers how to believe in herself. He trains her, steadies her, and, in many ways, carries the movie’s emotional spine. When Sara falters, Derek absorbs the impact so the story can keep moving.

What the movie is far less interested in is whether or not Derek gets that same care in return.

We’re told he has ambitions—Georgetown, med school, a life beyond the neighborhood—but those dreams remain largely theoretical. They exist as character traits, not narrative destinations. Once Sara’s grief lifts and her second Juilliard audition comes into focus, Derek’s future fades politely into the background. The movie assumes he’ll be fine. College-bound. Capable. Stable. But it never pauses long enough to show us what “fine” actually looks like for him.

This is an A and B Conversation, So C Yourself Out of It.

To rewatch Save the Last Dance today is to realize that the best parts of the film are neither Sara nor Derek, but Derek’s sister Chenille and Derek’s ex Nikki. Both actresses have enough charisma to wrench the film from Stiles and Thomas. Washington manages to seamlessly swing between warmth and frustration in her role as a teenage single mother. And Lawson unduly spent the ’90s getting pushed aside to make space for white girls (Buffy! Dawson’s Creek!), but her ability to channel authentic, complicated bitterness (while being a genuinely excellent dancer capable of pulling off a faux-leather tube top and detached sleeves combo) shines. Both their character arcs deserve our renewed attention, which is why I’ve chosen it for Blackasf's first Rewatch of 2026.

Chenille and Nikki feel real in a way the movie’s central romance often doesn’t. Mostly because, at their core, they’re just two women reacting to circumstances that won’t cut them much slack.

Chenille is managing adulthood far earlier than she should have to, carrying responsibility with a mix of competence and exhaustion that Washington plays without sentimentality. She loves her brother. She tolerates Sara. And she resents the limits placed on her life—often all at once.

Nikki, meanwhile, is allowed something rare for a movie like this: anger that makes sense. She’s not wrong to be suspicious. She’s not irrational to feel displaced. The film positions her as an obstacle to Sara, but she is a reality for so many Black women who are constantly made to feel like white women are the not only the better option but the goal for Black men who "make it". (Even in 2026, white women cosplaying as Black women are still held up on a higher pedestal than Black women being themselves.) Nikki clocks the imbalance immediately and refuses to smile through it. The film's flaw, for me anyway, is that it frames this reaction as bitter rather than valid. Likely because the film practically begs us to root for her downfall to make room for Sara's success.

That's How Easy It is to Give to Charity Around Here.

Beneath its hip-hop gear, Save the Last Dance is as basic as a teen drama can be. Neither especially inspired nor unpalatably saccharine, this tale of a white girl trying to fit into Black life on Chicago’s South Side while recovering her passion for ballet is grounded in bedrock formula and earnestness. And by the end, it's unexpectedly serious. Yet, it's still incredibly rewatchable, immensely quotable, and, for better or worse, it's final dance number, performed by Stiles, has cemented itself as one of the most iconic movie moments of the 2000s. (I won't pretend like my eleven year self didn't unironically memorize the moves.)

But while the movie’s encasement in the aughties pop-culture canon is undeniable, it’s worth reevaluating how, exactly, that happened.