I'll probably get a drubbing for this and a ton of "not helpful" votes, but I thought this movie was godawful! As well intentioned as it might have been (showing a different aspect of conditions in Nazi Germany) this production lacked so much as a wisp of authenticity. Acting was unconvincing, especially by the usually reliable Barbara Hershey and the no-lips Kenneth Branagh. It didn't help that some actors tried to adopt a German accent while others didn't bother to stray from San Fernando Valley English. The subject matter should generate empathy rather than stifled giggles, but blame that on the script and direction. This movie does not belong in the same category as films such as "The Pawnbroker," "The Diary of Anne Frank," "The Shop on Main Street," "Schindler's List," "Sophie's Choice," which cover a wide swath of proximate territory with far more verisimilitude and profundity.

DO NOT BOTHER! Horrible acting and average dancing. Forget it I just couldn't get into it when Germany was starving like my home country England. Rotten as I said besides your toenails need clipping don't waste the 90 minutes or so of your life! Furthermore, the story-line was thin and all over the place and the acting did not make me like any of the characters - The acting was over the top and it felt like Happy Days or the movie Greese with swastikas! Sad as the director Thomas Carter, tried but the cast choice was very strange. Willie is there and as Peter is driven away by the police he loudly screams "Swing Heil!" over and over again, which is very silly and pathetic. Evey - she was the worst actor and very wooden. SAY NO!

Taking the biblical reference, in this story we have a Peter "The Rock" and a "Doubting" Thomas. It is 1930s Germany and the teenagers have latched onto banned music, "swing" music, much of it by Jewish-American musicians like Benny Goodman. But Germany also wants its young men to become members of Hitler's Jugen (HJ) as a way of preparing them to become Nazis when they grow up.The nominal lead character is Robert Sean Leonard as Peter Müller. But the best performance here is by Christian Bale as his close friend Thomas Berger. They are part of the larger group of "swing kids" who gather to play swing music and dance. A risky activity at this time.The core of the story centers upon Peter who recognizes the evil of the Nazi propaganda, and resists it, while Thomas resists at first but eventually is swayed. The two friends increasingly are at odds, culminating in a fight near the end.This is both an entertaining movie, even though it involves a very serious subject, and also a historically significant one, as it relates to the Nazi doctrine. I suppose, looking at it now, it was the severe viewpoints, the "supremacy of the race", that got more and more Germans to turn against it and resist. As well as most of the rest of the world.

I do love swing music and love the music and artists from the era. So did my parents who were contemporary with it. But they had the good fortune to love it in the USA. It was a dangerous thing to like Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and most of all Arthur Shawronsky who the authorities did know was Artie Shaw. But these squares were the Gestapo and Swing Kids is about the youth who loved American swing music at considerable cost.Robert Sean Leonard, Christian Bale, Frank Whaley are three friends who are into American swing at a time in their country when such "jungle" music was Verboten. Swing Kids is the story about how all three were dealing with the growing strangulation of culture. One of the opening scenes takes place at a forbidden swing club where the kids are cutting a rug to Benny Goodman when word comes the authorities are near. Without a beat the band turns into a typical German Oompah band, the kind of music Herr Schicklgruber deemed acceptable to German youth.Which was being swallowed up by the Hitler Youth and the social pressures to join are enormous. Something that we in this country cannot fathom. I'm not a big fan of the current Pope, but about the only thing I'll give Benedict XVI a pass on was joining the Hitler Youth. At a certain point the wiggle room got less and less. Barbara Hershey as Leonard's mother gives a good performance as a woman keeping company with a Gestapo official for a little more comfort. Her husband and Leonard and David Tom's father had been arrested by the Gestapo a few years back and died as a result of their custody. The Gestapo official is played by an unbilled Kenneth Branagh who took no billing for his part deliberately.Swing Kids has a timely lesson for today if some in federal authority will care to learn it. The fundamentalist Moslems just as the Nazis hate our decadent culture. The answer is keep importing it into places like Iran by the cargo ship load. Don't bomb them to death, just send them our music and films.By the way our own fundamentalist Christians hated that music as they hate the music of today. Something about authoritarianism of whatever stripe just hates contemporary culture, whatever it is at the time.Swing Kids is a valuable lesson about freedom of expression wrapped up in a good entertaining package.