Fabulous indie gem ‘Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!’ is an early Sundance highlight you’ll love

PARK CITY, Utah — After the untimely death of her husband, Ha-chan is barely a shadow of her old effervescent and life-loving self.

Along those same lines, the Sundance Film Festival, in programming such an entertaining, vibrant, uplifting and assuredly wacky movie on Day 1, feels like it’s had a personality shift — for the better.

Lately the good stuff up in the mountains has arrived on Day 3 or 4. Some years, my airport Uber beats it to the punch.

However, “Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!,” a delirious gem from writer-director Josef Kubota Wladyka about a Japanese woman in her mid-forties whose second language is dance, has got it all: big laughs, poignancy, a tear or two, “Dirty Dancing” homages and some truly out-there twists.   

Serious indie film festivalgoers tend to not be “dancing in aisles” types, but you could tell this glam crowd wanted to throw off those parkas.

As Ha-chan, or Haru, Rinko Kikuchi is dolled up as a disco goddess, with her hair in playful Little Orphan Annie curls and robin’s egg blue mascara smeared on her eyelids. 

She’s kind and bashful until she puts an LP on the record player and starts whirling and jiving with her man — kind of like Jennifer Grey’s Baby, come to think of it.

Her Ha-chan is as lovable as it gets, even when she’s doing some very bad, morally questionable things.

Ha-chan competes in dance competitions with her Mexican husband Luis (Alejandro Edda). And, although they live in Tokyo, the sexy styles point westward: rumba, tango, paso doble. 

Rinko Kikuchi plays Ha-chan. Daniel Satinoff

At one event — unrealistically shot like the “Dance at the Gym” from “West Side Story” — Luis suddenly drops dead. Crushed, Ha-chan locks herself inside her disco-evoking house and stops seeing her sister Yuki and nymphomaniac New York friend Hiromi.  

Nine months later, the “Mamma Mia!”-like duo finally drag Ha-chan back to her local dance studio, where a hot new teacher named Fedir has taken over. Fedir (Alberto Guerra), they giggle, was on “Dancing With the Stars.”

The widow’s got hungry eyes, and suddenly we’re at “How Ha-Chan Got Her Groove Back.”

But there’s more creativity here than merely rumba-ing to a rom-com rubric.

Embracing Japanese spirituality, Luis sticks around as a mischievous ghost in the form of a plush-toy giant chick, like an otherworldly being out of “Spirited Away.”

The “Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!” team attends the Sundance Film Festival. Getty Images

There are multiple joyous company numbers. One is a choreographed street fight to “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes that’s both a scrape and a flashmob. Important though is the sequences are not too slick. Ha-chan isn’t supposed to be a pro. More than once I thought of Toni Collette jamming to ABBA in “Muriel’s Wedding,” if not quite as pathetic.

And there are distinctly un-romantic parts of the movie — huge lies are told, jealous rages are flown into, non-traditional sexual proclivities hop in, criminal activity goes down — that all combine into a story so delightfully unusual. 

If “Ha-chan” suffers from anything, it’s the old “all entertainment can lose 15 minutes” adage. “Ha-chan” could’ve used some whittling. Yet Wladyka keeps the film lively with a sparkler aesthetic and a flair for musical storytelling.

By the crowd-pleaser ending, the movie lives up to the hit song from one of its clear cinematic inspirations: “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life.”