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Whit Stillman embarrasses white critics who don't like to be reminded what social group they belong to, or which class categories exclude them. It's comical-almost as funny as Stillman dialogue-to see them knock The Last Days of Disco because it isn't about black and gay subcultures (like they care) or Studio 54 in its prime, Read the title, kids.

The subject of Stillman's three films so far is white insularity-a commonplace tat goes unquestioned, in fact celebrated, in most American movies. But not here; implicit in Stillman's Disco is a rare, rueful knowledge of white cultural succession. Sit in the early 80's, Disco captures a particular moment-after disco's heyday but before the yuppie coronation became official. Stillman's tiny world affords the most accurate-yet view of that subtle social transition (as smooth as the chord changes in "Good Times," but not beneficent). This may frustrate people who want to see guiltless urban glamour plus the rush of a hectic environment and gaudy atmosphere. The latter seems outside Stillman's temperament yet his language and plotting are nunced and evocative. True to psychological convolutions that occur within fad and trend, he isn't just partying, but has made a serious comedy.

Stillman follows a group of Harvard grads and boarding-school girls laying claim to New York City as a birthright. Entry-level publishing grunts Alice (Chloe Sevegry) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) are man and career-hunting. At a Studio 54-like club, they intermingle with Josh (Matt Keeslar) , an assistant district attorney; Jimmy (MacKenzie Astin), an ad man; Des (Chris Eigeman), the club's major-domo; plus Dan (Matthew Ross) their publishing coworker. Stillman gets the personalities as correct as the chronology. These horny stiffs are not chic socialites or that later grungy phenomenon Club Kids; inheritors and despoilers of urban leisure, these in-between elites, in fact, pioneered the 80's déclassé nightlife (soon to be commodified and regulated). Woody Allen movies say nothing about these kinds of social manners-the bland security of skin privilege and youth, passports through Studio 54's velvet ropes. Yet Stillman reveals the intricate rules and teensy obsession and he captures the precise tenor, "Tom's smart and somewhat cool." "You mean Departmental Dan!" "He's not without good qualities-even if very few." And when Alice and Charlotte doubt each other's friendship or casually steal a boyfriend, there's no mistaking the damage inflicted, or how such emotional alliances-like Des and Josh's antagonistic bond-persist through decorum. This isn't hedonistic-or WASP-glorification; It's simply one of the most exacting movies and about young adult errantry.

Stillman arrived with a developed sensibility in his first film, Metropolitan (1990),: small gestures and fastidious, comic articulation emphasized qualities and traits that distinguish an individual within a group. His singular interest in character reveals each one's moral quest. The effort to behave decently, even by the most eccentric (self-serving) standards, gives Stillman's upperclassman stories a surprising kick and a fine grain. This stems from an impulse to critique, but mainly it's personal perception of how class and individual habits clash, the result of a fresh, distinctive style. Instead of urging reform from the outside-Hollywood's typical crude assumption-Stillman has an unusual, nonjudgmental rigor. He brings movies a rare insider's sensation; dispassionate wit-as if Preston Sturges had stuck to surveying his own class origins.

Seen up close, no none in Disco's clique is outlandish; they're startlingly ordinary, to which Stillman lends fascination. He distills Sevigny's calculated celebrity imprudence from the bohemian exploitation of Kids an Gummo to the truth; she's not much of an actress and garbies her early dialogue, but then settles into a perfectly cossetted young frumpiness. She's paired with the law man Josh, who Keeslar plays as both prig and enthusiast uncovering a tenuous social standing. Josh articulates Stillman's social impulses, "When the time comes to have a social life, I wished there'd be a place to drink, dance, talk," calling himself a "loyal adherent to the disco movement." It's hard to dislike him. His romance with Alice gives the movie a late stir, their compatibility seems a nightlife dream but complicated by compromises adulthood forces upon them.

These are Stillman's fullest, most daring characters yet. Alice and Josh's first private talk ("I take no fro an answer," he tells her when she teases) contains bold, humanist risk. Describing himself as a loon, Josh recites a hymn, then makes the sound of a bird, swaying off balance as he walks down the street, "You think I'm wacko?" he asks , taking Alice inside his loneliness, an her sad look communicates a shared confidence. Contemporary movies rarely get as intimate as that and Stillman goes further. English actress Kate Beckinsale achieves a striking American bitch transformation: Sleek, haughty and precipitate, her churning insecurities are protected by an impeccable, inherited facade. Beckinsale's Charlotte constantly abrades and one-ups her initial infatuations, yet Stillman shows a side of her character-she sings-that takes the entire comedy of manners into unexpected territory, revealing a suppressed cultural background that explains these urbane pilgrims at both their best and worst.

A rung below wealth but still relying on family subsidy ("It's a small allowance," Charlotte notes), these white characters are charged with the capacity to be fully, infuriatingly human. That's because while admitting their advantages, Stillman has expunged the Hollywood tradition-itself a class constructed bias-that makes us expect a caustic, dismissive or trivial view of the ruling class. Stillman disorients robotic viewers by presenting characters who are already caustic, dismissive and trivializing. "The Woodstock generation was so full of itself" Charlotte sniffs. And her comment ironically pegs her own generation-if that slips by, you miss the marvel Stillman intends.

This Brooks Brothers Gibbons has claimed a specific historical moment as a result of thinking through the past two decades of New York's urban upheaval. Many filmmakers have availed themselves of prerogative and delusion, ignoring the recession all around them, yet Stillman goes back and concentrates on forgotten details of genuine 80's American class drudgery and evolution. This is the movie in which young folks share a railroad apartment ("These were built for working-class families, now yuppie roommate combos are crowding them out," Dan says and Charlotte settles it "That's just tough"); where a young professional irons his own shirts; where nightclub small talk reveals easy snobbery and deep naiveté. Disco depicts the shock of worldly realization descending upon the generation that came of age after a period of intense folly-youth on the verge of smugness.

In the passionately sarcastic manner Chris Eigman brings to Stillman's films (Des scores off the club's gratuities of cocaine and easy sex, dumping female conquests by claiming he's gay), the playboy proves to be Disco's most caustic prognosticator, Des wonders, "To thine own self be true? What if thine own self was irredeemably rotten? Wouldn't it be better to not be true to thine self?" His questions challenge every opportunity that has fallen his way (or ever will), yet even this scoundrel gets one's compassion because that self-questioning is honest. Better than judging disco-era sex and drug habits, Stillman knows that social habits affect his characters' lives spiritually, profoundly, ("Come on, everybody gets something." Charlotte nags in a remorseless speech about vacareal disease and a gay main couple passes in the next shot.) That's the respect Stillman pays to the period he surveys. as Josh reflects, "We can change our context, we can't change ourselves."

Josh's most heated and personal argument with Des explicates Lady and the Tramp, a vivid debate compressing their generation's politics and culture into an outline of the era's eventual power shifts and betrayed affections. It's hilarious but possibly a miscalculation. That discussion really ought to be about disco, deicing into the way one cultural parvenu says, "Disco sucks" to another, only waiting his chance to join in. Stillman makes genuine use of music. No false appropriations, The Last Days of Disco reveals pop's cultural plurality, distinguishing Casablanca Records from Philadelphia International and appreciating both.

In Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edward's group Chic, the expression of romantic and social suppuration fabricated a vision of utopia that reached its peak in the 1979 single "Good Times." Swanky strings over funky bass notes poised ethereal ease (a fantasy) next to earthly grind (dance). That's what made disco political,; musicians and dancers remade their world through rhythm and will-dialectical sensuality was any impulse felt in your pelvis and your feet. Chic's desiring (extended in hiphop by the Sugarhill Gang and De La Soul both sampling "Good Times") are innately understood as all-American. That's why it's a splendid soundtrack for Stillman's vision of the young white educated class' gentrification. It's about that starting-out period, but uses the great presence that disco music still has to make a story of then relevant to now. Scrutinizing that phase, Stillman clarifies how we got in the mess we're in today.

From Ivy League backgrounds to new urban beginnings, Stillman's clique goes through social reengineering no different from the black urban experience Rodgers-and-Edwards dreamed in "Good Times," "What About Me," "Real People," "I Want Your Love," "Rebels Are We," etc, Chic's brittle and elastic tunes, adopting Wes Montogery's insouciance to youthful drive, mark a change in black social perspective (check Chic's gorgeous "So Fine" from the neglected masterpiece Take It Off ) similar to the ambitions of Stillman's brood. The well-selected disco tunes-from Carol Douglas' "Doctor's Orders" to Cheryl Lynn's "Got To Be Real," Gwen McRae's "Rockin' Chair" and Evelyn "Champagne" King's imperishable "Shame"-provide a parallel dramatic ambiance. Chic's "Everybody Dance" is such a pleasure cushion that even bad white dancing seems graced by it. The restraint and passion in the female vocals and the dexterous arrangements on that record are, if nothing else, testimonies to black capacity and ingenuity. But the film's most discomforting irony (for some) is that Stillman's characters realize disco tells their story, too. Stillman remembers "regular" people killed disco (a documentary fragment preserves the fact of American homophobia and racism), but he know black and gay largesse, as expressed through that music, embraced all nonetheless. Call it Cosmopolitan.

Armond White
Staff Writer