-By Kevin Lally

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Mao’s Last Dancer is a conventionally told biopic with two powerful assets that make it a potential crowd-pleaser: a pretty remarkable true story, and an appealing lead actor who is also an extraordinary dancer. Director Bruce Beresford’s film doesn’t stray far from TV-movie territory, but art-house audiences—particularly those who also enjoy ballet—aren’t likely to care.

Screenwriter Jan Sardi (the Oscar-winning Shine) chronicles the life of Li Cunxin, a Chinese ballet student who is selected for a cultural-exchange program with the Houston Ballet in 1981. The film opens with his arrival in Texas, wide-eyed with wonder at his first encounter with a towering American city. He’s welcomed into the home of Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood), the company’s British artistic director, and gets his first taste of Western culture, including a night of disco dancing.

Li’s acclimation to his new environment is intercut with scenes showing just how far he’s come. As a child, Li grew up poor in a rural village and was plucked from his classroom at age 11 to attend the rigorous Beijing Dance Academy. Initially a most unpromising student, he dramatically improves through a regimen of sheer hard work, to the point where his talent stands out when the Americans come calling.

In Houston, an injury to a principal dancer leads to a scary opportunity for Li to step in as the last-minute substitute for the lead role in a televised production, and it’s a triumph. Li becomes a local celebrity, and soon is making headlines when he impetuously marries an American dance student and announces his intention to defect.

In the movie’s strongest sequence, Li goes to the Chinese consulate to argue his case and is separated from his new bride and detained by his government. What follows is a tense standoff in which Li’s new American friends use all their press and government connections to obtain the dancer’s freedom.

None of this would work if Beresford hadn’t found the right actor for the title role. In fact, Li is ably played by three actors, including Huang Wen Bin as the child who first enters the Beijing Academy and Chengwu Gou as the teenage prodigy. But the majority of footage belongs to Chi Cao, a handsome, engaging principal dancer with the Birmingham Royal Ballet with no previous acting experience apart from his ballet performances. Chi is not only a terrific dancer, as showcased in several ballet sequences that wisely show his full figure, but he convinces as an unworldly young man experiencing an alien new culture. Greenwood is also surprisingly persuasive as the gentle, elegant Stevenson, quite a stretch from recent roles like the ruthless exec in Dinner for Schmucks or the starship captain in Star Trek. Kyle MacLachlan is less credible with his thick Texas accent as a high-powered lawyer negotiating for Li’s freedom. Onetime Last Emperor and “Twin Peaks” co-star Joan Chen has fairly thankless duties as Li’s long-suffering mother, but she does get to participate in the movie’s three-hankie finale.

Location filming in China adds some authenticity to the story, even if the film follows a pretty basic path of contrasting Western freedom with the rigid totalitarianism of Li’s upbringing. (A comment about free-spending Texans is about as critical as the movie gets about Li’s new home.) But, reminiscent of Rudolf Nureyev’s suspenseful defection in 1961, Li Cunxin’s East-West odyssey has become an effective movie about clashing cultures.