Tayla Solomon, Cori Grainger, and Blessing Giraldo (Jeff Vespa)

Broadway producer Amanda Lipitz won a Tony Award for her 2016 revival of A View from the Bridge. But some years ago, she was still making short films about young women and their pursuit of higher education at such institutions as the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, a public charter school that opened in 2009. Working on various short-form pieces, she spent years documenting the school, but it wasn’t until she saw its step team, the Lethal Ladies of BLSYW (Bliss) that she found the hook for her feature length debut.

The result of a long rapport and years of filming, Step focuses on three Bliss seniors on the road to a big step competition in Bowie, Md., and on the road to college. It would be easy to frame this as a sports movie, tracking the team from practice to competition, but Lipitz does something more revealing. The meat of the film is about the school’s ultimate goal: to have 100 percent of its inaugural graduating class accepted into college. With her background in musicals, Lipitz uses step dancing sequences like set pieces, expressing through sound and movement what these young girls can’t always articulate in their confessionals.

The young women at the center of the film are inspiring, yet their lives are not without struggle. Blessin, the founder and de facto leader of the Lethal Ladies, is a charismatic young woman who wants to get away from Baltimore to become a professional choreographer. We see her boundless optimism and her difficult home life, with a mother battling mental health issues.

Cori, the whip-smart eldest of her family, is already older than her mother was when she was born. She wants to be valedictorian and get a full ride to Johns Hopkins because without a scholarship, she probably couldn’t afford it.

Finally there’s Tayla, whose mother is present at most of the step team’s rehearsals and seems poised to be the textbook irritating dance mom. However, this matriarch proves to be a far more important part of the ensemble, a figure who sees the whole team as her extended progeny.

It’s a testament to editor Penelope Falk’s incredible work that this documentary at times feels like a tightly-scripted coming of age film. The stories of the three main girls dovetail so well, largely because of the community the school instills. Lipitz and Falk do a great job capturing the crackling energy of step as a dance medium, using percussive cutting patterns to mimic the beat of each performance. But on the larger canvas, their fly-on-the-wall perspective on this nourishing community of black women is strangely unique in contemporary film.

Step‘s best moments show that it isn’t just the girls’ parents pushing them to do better than they did at their age, but such authority figures as Lethal Ladies’ coach Gari, and particularly Paula Dofat, the Director of College Counseling who works tirelessly to find the right path for each girl. Everyone is shown with such breadth that their personalities, foibles and shining light bursts through in every scene.

This summer’s mega-budget blockbusters can’t pack the cathartic punch provided by the most satisfying moments in Step‘s triumphant third act. And this is real life.

—

Step
Directed & Written by Amanda Lipitz
Rated PG for thematic elements and some language
83 Minutes
Opens today at Landmark’s Bethesda Row Cinema, AFI Silver & Cultural Center and Regal Gallery Place Stadium 14