A lot of people will be out tonight trying to have a good time, and with a lot of luck, a precious few of them will have as much fun as the people in Greg Harrison's Groove. An ensemble cast comedy set in San Francisco and taking place mostly over the course of a single night, Groove is a snapshot of '90s rave culture, beginning with the party bringers, led by Ernie (Steve Van Wormer) checking out the abandoned warehouse where they'll throw their shindig and then sending out the long and winding instructions on how to get there. ("Who would want to go to a party that actually lets you know where it is?" yells one aggravated dude who missed that left turn at Albuqueque and spends the whole evening in a futile search for the promised land.) Van Wormer's Ernie makes a terrific underground hero figure for the Techno-Information Age. Throwing parties seems to be his religion, and he lays out an awesome spread--with food, drink, and a steadily escalating line-up of DJs (among them John Digweed and Melissa Sue "Forest" Green), all the while patroling the crowds to make sure that everyone's giving out the right vibes and enjoying themselves. He might be dutifully earning his last merit badge or completing his samurai training.

The mission to successfully steer the party to a satisfying conclusion is what the movie has instead of a plot. Its central identification figures are David (Hamish Linklater, who looks and acts like every guy who just missed getting cast in the title role of the TV series Chuck), who's been dragged to his first rave by his brother Colin (Denny Kirkwood), and Leyla (Lola Glaudini), who's maybe been to a few too many. Glaudini's Leyla, who has the kind of glamour that only the right combination of heavy eyelids and glitter platforms can bestow on a girl, is starting to think about life beyond the party scene but has no idea how to go about it. "You're very pretty," David tells her. "You're very high," she replies. "If I weren't, I'd still think you were," he responds. "I just wouldn't say it." The cornball romance has a fetching degree of real sweetness, and the movie surrounds it with plenty of affable goofball types to keep things popping at the edges. Filmmaker-musician Ari Gold plays the resident drug dealer, who offers a customer "an all-expense-paid trip to your cerebral cortex"; a T.A. during the day, he has to dodge his own students and put up with his own drug-buddy sidekick, Todd (Angelo Spizziri), who grows less and less mellow as the evening progresses and his high stubbornly refuses to kick in. At one point, Todd gazes at the crowd and muses, "You know, if you got past the big floppy clown pants and the Tickle-Me Elmo backpacks, some of these girls would be pretty hot!"

Groove is more pleasant than exciting, and its shaggy approach to storytelling means that some of the performers--especially Mackenzie Firgens, as Colin's doe-eyed girlfriend--don't get the chance to show you everything you feel they could do. But it's funny and friendly and speckled with images that would be iconic if the movie were better known, such as a shot of one of Ernie's team, Maggie (Elizabeth Sun) happily zoning out while watching her clothes tumble around in a public washateria, and another, Guy (played by a dude billed as "Dmitri from the Lower Haight") riding the commuter rail with a mirror ball in his lap. The movie's rarest accomplishment is the way that it succeeds in making the rave scene look like affectionate, nursery-room fun--childhood regained--without coming across as sappy. It just seems like what a bunch of intelligent, socially attuned, fun-loving people would do if they had the time and the technology, partly for the fun of being there and partly for the pride in having made it happen. ("Remember," Ernie instructs his minions, "no obstacles--only challenges.") When it opened in the summer of 2000, Harrison (who has made only one other picture since, the 2004 November, a puzzle movie with a couple of pieces missing) invoked such movies as Dazed and Confused and American Graffiti in interviews, but at the time, the difference between those movies and his was that Groove wasn't historically far removed enough from its scene for its pleasures to qualify as bittersweet: it didn't make you choke up a little over a moment that now seems long gone. It does now.