Since 2001’s Save the Last Dance, Hollywood has developed a microgenre of pictures based on street dancing. Directed by hacks and starring no-names, films like You Got Served (2004) and Stomp the Yard (2007) are virtual clones of each other, not so much stand-alone features as episodes in some imaginary teenage franchise. This year’s Step Up 2 the Streets (a follow-up to 2006’s Step Up) ruthlessly distills the form, setting its lissome leads adrift in rain-soaked street battles, steamy make-out sessions, and rote interracial reconciliation.

Although it makes no reference to those corporate-made movies, Toronto-born, Philadelphia-raised filmmaker Benson Lee’s Planet B-Boy implicitly criticizes them, positing break dancing not just as a flashy leisure pursuit but as an all-consuming way of life. Less stylized than David LaChapelle’s Rize (2005), which profiled Los Angeles’s krumping subculture, Lee’s film examines the lives of some of the world’s best B-boy crews, following five teams on their paths to Germany and the annual Battle of the Year, the de facto world championship of urban dance.

The French crew exudes stylishness and grace; the Americans are streetwise classicists; the Korean squads are acrobatic daredevils; and the Japanese are unparalleled in their synthesis of all those strains. The B-boys converge at the personal level; mostly teenage and middle class, the protagonists struggle to justify their passion to their conventionally pragmatic parents. However poised they may appear on-stage, Lee paints these young men as a determined but occasionally faltering band of outsiders.

“B-boys get no shine from society, nor from the dance community, nor even from the mainstream hip-hop community,” Lee says from his New York City home. “These guys love kung fu films because they relate to the main character’s journey: being on their own, acquiring knowledge, trying to attain a state of wisdom. They have that warrior attitude; they train on their own and, ultimately, they prove themselves in a competitive arena.”

The 38-year-old Lee is finding his way in the similarly conflict-strewn independent-film market. After scoring a Sundance screening for his first film, Miss Monday (1998), Lee has spent most of the past 10 years paying bills with uncredited commercial work. He plans to jump back into features with two projects: a fictional adaptation of Planet B-Boy, and Tokyo Sisters, a real-life account of what he calls “an exposé of Japanese high society”.

“Making the documentary opened my eyes to the fact that truth can be stranger than fiction,” he offers. “The experience I had in making Miss Monday helped me to wrestle all this documentary material into a coherent story. Working that way seems like the best of both worlds: shooting real-life footage digs up interesting stories, and the writer in me can work out how to tell those stories in a controlled, satisfying way.”