Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant's PBS documentary tracks the rise and fall of subway graffiti in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Style Wars is a landmark documentary capturing the birth of hip-hop graffiti culture on New York City's subway system at a singular historical moment. Its Novelty is genuinely exceptional — it remains the definitive, irreplaceable record of this subculture, with an unmistakable voice and access that has never been replicated. The cinematography is functional and gritty, appropriate for the subject but not visually transcendent. The 'acting' (subjects' on-camera presence) is naturalistic and compelling, particularly figures like Cap and Skeme, though uneven as expected in documentary. The narrative arc covering the city's crackdown gives the film dramatic structure, and the ending — showing the erasure of the art form — carries genuine weight, though it arrives somewhat abruptly. Overall a culturally essential film whose greatest strength is its singular position as a primary document of a vanished world.