Seventeen-year-old Sara Johnson, a promising ballet dancer in suburban Chicago, hopes to be admitted to the Juilliard School and implores her mother to attend the audition.

She moves to the South Side to live with her estranged father Roy, a relatively unsuccessful jazz musician who plays the trumpet at nightclubs.

Sara quickly befriends Chenille Reynolds, a teenage single mother who is having relationship problems with her ex-boyfriend Kenny.

Derek likes Sara, and decides to help her develop her dancing abilities by incorporating more hip hop into her style.

Julia Stiles landed the role of Sara after director Thomas Carter saw her dance scene in the 1999 film 10 Things I Hate About You.

[4] On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 53% approval rating based on 100 reviews, with an average score of 5.5/10 and a consensus: "This teen romance flick feels like a predictable rehashing of other movies."

"[7] In a three-star review, Roger Ebert said that despite the film's clichéd story and romance, "the development is intelligent, the characters are more complicated than we expect, and the ending doesn't tie everything up in a predictable way.

"[9] Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Mark Caro said, "On paper the movie is full of cliches recently explored elsewhere...Yet in this case the outline is not the story; the people who inhabit it are," and in this way, "Save the Last Dance triumphantly passes the audition.

"[10] Negative reviews criticized the editing style of dance scenes, the film's "after-school special"-like subplot, and the script for not delving enough into the issues of interracial relationships.

"[11] Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly wrote, "director Thomas Carter is afraid to pump up the volume on its own interracial, hip hop Romeo and Juliet story, lest it challenge even one sedated viewer or disturb the peace.

It was ranked with the poor dancing of similarly themed teen movies from the early 2000s such as Honey, You Got Served and Stomp the Yard.

[13] Its characterization of "hip hop dancing" as amounting to 'random fingerpointing and sitting awkwardly in a chair' has spawned viral memes on social media.

[13][14] Additionally, the plot line suggesting that Sara's subpar audition was enough to earn admission to Juilliard has been mocked as "ludicrous".

That figure makes the fine arts school harder to get into than Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania.