The film follows two high school students in their attempt to be swing kids by night and Hitler Youth by day, a decision that acutely impacts their friends and families.

[2] In Hamburg in 1939, Peter Müller and Thomas Berger join their friends Arvid and Otto at a swing club called the Bismarck.

Herr Müller had been accused of being a communist, and his health was irreparably damaged by an interrogation at the hands of Nazi agents.

Thomas also joins, telling Peter that they will be able to enjoy both the privileges of Hitler Youth membership and the pleasures of being Swing Kids.

Arvid is confronted on the street by a group of Hitler Youth, including former friend and fellow Swing Kid Emil.

[3] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 39 out of 100, based on 20 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews.

"[6] In a 2005 retrospective of Ebert's all time lowest rated films, he included Swing Kids in the grouping "Sex, romance, music, drama and other crap".

[7] Writing for the MIT student newspaper, The Tech, reporter Joshua M. Andresen called it "amazing", and felt that the "well-researched film is wonderfully acted".

For that uninformed youth audience, Swing Kids is a grim history lesson on the horrors the Nazis inflicted on fellow Germans during Adolf Hitler's move toward World War in 1939.In the United States and Canada, Swing Kids grossed $5.6 million at the box office,[9] against a budget of $12 million.