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Feel-good documentary ‘Step’ dances to a familiar, pleasant tune

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The team practices its moves.
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Three stars

Step Directed by Amanda Lipitz. Rated PG. Opens Friday at Suncoast and Town Square.

The plot of Step so closely follows the structure of an underdog sports movie that if it were fiction it would come off as entirely formulaic. But Amanda Lipitz’s film is a documentary, and it mostly earns its moments of triumph and uplift, cheesy as they might sometimes feel.

Her subject is the step-dance team at the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, an inner-city charter school dedicated to sending every one of its students to college. The movie started as essentially an internal document for the school (of which Lipitz’s mother is the founder), but grew into something larger when Lipitz started focusing on the step team as they prepared for a major regional competition.

After introducing the school and the step team, the movie narrows its scope to three members of the team, and ends up devoting most of its screen time to just one teen, the charismatic but troubled Blessin Giraldo. Possibly because Lipitz didn’t have a plan in place beforehand, the movie ends up a bit uneven, following various threads that don’t always come together cohesively.

While the step routines are intricate and energetic, Lipitz spends a lot of time away from the rehearsals, delving into her subjects’ home lives, and the final competition seems to come up rather abruptly. Other potentially interesting avenues, including one girl’s mother’s job as a corrections officer, turn out to be mostly dead ends, especially as Blessin’s story crowds out her fellow steppers.

Almost all of the individual elements are fascinating, though, and Blessin and the other teens are easy to root for as they navigate poverty and difficult home lives on the path to a step championship and future educational goals. Lipitz presents their stories in a crowd-pleasing, readily digestible package that would be unforgivably manipulative if it weren’t so earnest and endearing.

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