Five Dances is the beautiful story of a naive but very gifted 18-year-old dancer named Chip. He came to New York from his troubled home in Kansas for a summer dance workshop and managed to stay on into the new year, when the story takes place.
The movie begins as he joins four older dancers (two each, male and female) rehearsing for an upcoming performance. He slowly gets past his social awkwardness and begins to develop relationships with the others - especially with Katie, who becomes like an older sister to him, and later with Theo.
His opening up is the key theme of the movie, which takes place almost entirely in the studio as the dancers rehearse. It has no other cast but the five dancers. (All of them are professional dancers, not actors, but they do both jobs brilliantly in this movie.)
The movie itself is like a dance, gracefully and deliberately paced and choreographed, the characters weaving in and out of each other's lives as they do in the dance they're rehearsing. Anyone who hates classical modern dance, or who hates slow character development with very little irrelevant action or drama, will not enjoy this movie.
However, it does not require any particular knowledge of or interest in dance. Indifference to dance should not be a handicap, but the viewer must be able to watch dancers without irritation.
And it definitely is a gay movie. It's a sort of coming-out story - really more an opening-out story, because Chip is coming out of his shell as a person even more than as a gay man. It's also a sexy and tender and gratifying love story.
Although it has those conventional gay-movie elements, the grace and discipline of dance permeate everything and make this an entirely original and unique - and unusually beautiful - gay movie. Alan Brown's earlier movie Private Romeo (also highly original) was my favorite gay movie for a long time, but Five Dances is even better.