A musical, set and produced in Russia and directed by Valery Todorovsky, the movie follows members of a Soviet youth subculture as they defy the State by emulating the conventions of what they imagine to be the American cool. The brilliance of the picture, beyond being a fun and handsomely crafted film filled with illuminating depictions of mid-50s Moscow's underground jazz and cocktail culture, is that it is also an interesting study of that phenomenon known as the hipster.
The wisdom of Stilyagi is that real hipsters are about much more than fad or fashion. They are at the heart of any social revolution, and their forms of self-expression, which achieve such notoriety after the fact, are mere trappings of their greater rebellion. What Hipsters seeks to say, if only in subtext, is that jazz is great, but the social changes that sprung from it are even greater.
Where you will find real change, you will find people doing things different, and when they succeed, history calls them Hipsters.
