Well before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Bronx-born phenomenon of break dancing had been chewed up and spat out as a mainstream fad, doomed for disposal the moment three rapping Chicken McNuggets did body spins in a TV commercial. Then, in 1990, the art form found an unlikely refuge and rebirth by way of a new world competition, Battle of the Year, which was staged not on the form’s home turf, nor even in its home continent, but in Germany. The inability to stop the body rock had gone global.

Now, Benson Lee’s “Planet B-Boy” fulfills what’s become the latest phase of the pop-culture cycle: a slick, superficial documentary spooning out thrills and platitudes. Mr. Lee browses an international grab bag of B-boy groups en route to Battle of the Year 2005, loosely following the contest format popularized by the 2002 film “Spellbound” and reality shows. Helicoptering limbs and floor-flouting freezes are on invigorating display, but as for history or background, the film hustles past with the keep-it-moving bonhomie that is customary for filmmakers using this template.

A checklist history opens the film and dates the movement (so to speak) back to the turn-of-the’70s stirrings of the hip-hop scene. After name-checking the break-dancing breakdown in “Flashdance,” “Planet B-Boy” pushes global community and diversity (rather like another urban-culture documentary that made its premiere at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, the graffiti survey “Bomb It”). The devoted squads who will end up competing — from South Korea, France, Japan, and America — are each introduced with an animated subway car, and do their initial contortions in front of landmarks.

Since the film skims through national distinctions (Koreans do good “power moves”) and omits further history or terms, it’s really all about the dancing demos and, ultimately, the Teutonic battle royal. The groups — including Korea’s Gamblerz, Japan’s Ichigeki, and France’s Phase T — work through sets that demonstrate the form’s sped-up grace and compact acrobatics. Some of the most scintillating moments, however, occur during “battles,” improvised top-this face-offs in which the fluid skill and combat metaphors recall the Afro-Brazilian dance-fighting style capoeira. But a crippling problem is that we mostly do not hear the beats that accompanied the performances shown. Music and individuality are pushed as crucial to the very definition of “the art of B-boying,” but monotonously “propulsive” big-beat is the soundtrack, at saturation levels that approach the mindless Muzak in an exercise machine ad. Maybe copyrighted samples in the original tracks are the reason, but the substitute often paves over what’s driving the dancers and effectively renders the breakdancing a mute, visual art.

But “Planet B-Boy,” which opens Friday at Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema, falls a bit short visually, as well. Mr. Lee prefers clusters of highlights to showing the dances in full, and even the Battle of the Year concert-contest feels unaccountably rushed considering it is the film’s destination. Besides being frustrating, the tendency undermines the insistence on breakdancing as an art rather than an exercise in boasting.

The dancers are jazzed but mostly relegated to sound bites; even until the very end, the movie needs to identify each group with a subtitle. A few of the dancers are packaged with quickie parental redemption bits: A Korean B-boy bonds with his single father, who promotes flags for a living, while the battle-weary mother of a runtish French teenager sloughs off her racism. (One background one-liner does hit the spot with diffident understatement: “Since I was young, I always lacked calmness.”) The final competition at Battle of the Year often dazzles, with the styles of the choreographed sets ranging from Phase T’s circus-like tumbling to Ichigeki’s precise turntable-themed synchrony (a marvel). But our scant familiarity with the moves or the groups forestalls drama, and the highlight editing, which eschews the dance as a long form, is downright maddening. (And not incidentally, the film’s tunnel vision for the contest bypasses the many ways that break-dancing has cross-pollinated, and suggests a total absence of female dancers.) The halfway treatment gets numbing, and the art form awaits more intrepid explorers.