STYLE WARS takes you a journey into the secret world of New York’s youthful graffiti writers, who risk arrest and injury to win fame for their names, and sometimes for their skills as artists. Their main medium is the city’s transit system –a traveling art gallery to some, a plague-ridden eyesore to others. The film explores this private world (and the angry controversy surrounding it) from the point of view of the graffitists themselves, of public officials like Mayor Koch, of despairing parents, and of people of the art world. The film also documents the rise to fame of the “break-dancers” of the Rock Steady Crew (featured in the movie “Flashdance”). Together graffiti, rap music and breaking are the prime expressions of the culture “hip-hop”, the most important young people’s pop movement of the 80’s. STYLE WARS is the first full-length documentary on this movement. STYLE WARS reflects a worldwide concern with a multitude of social, political and aesthetic issues –all of them raised by the transformation of vandalism into an increasingly recognized art form.