Biopic about Chinese ballet dancer is art-house hit

It features no big-name stars, drew mediocre reviews and traffics in the esoterica of Chinese ballet.

And yet Mao's Last Dancer, the true story of a ballet performer who defected to the United States in 1981, has become one of the season's biggest art-house hits.

Bruce Beresford's Australian-produced film tells of Li Cunxin, an 11-year-old Chinese boy plucked from his rural village in 1972 under the reign of Mao Zedong to dance for the Beijing Ballet. While in residence at the Houston Ballet a decade later, he defected to the United States in an incident that entailed a politically charged standoff involving the FBI and international diplomats. (A main character is the Houston Ballet's Ben Stevenson, who's now at North Texas' Texas Ballet Theater.)

Many critics have found the film's inspirational story both overly earnest and told in a single key. But audiences have felt very differently.

Despite a tough climate for specialty films, the largely English-language movie has taken in more than $4.5 million at the U.S. box office -- an impressive run that's lasted nearly three months. More people have gone to see Mao's Last Dancer than they have some much higher-profile, star-studded specialty films this year, including the dystopian drama Never Let Me Go and the dramedy Greenberg.

The movie's returns have also surpassed far more publicized films such as the social-media thriller Catfish.

Mao's has done all this despite fading quickly in independent-film strongholds such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Instead, it has garnered the lion's share of its audience in cities such as San Diego and St. Louis, where it continues to play, according to its distributor, Samuel Goldwyn/ATO Pictures.

"It's more of an audience film than a critic's film," said Michael Silberman, president of distribution and marketing at IDP, the company that releases Goldwyn and ATO films.