The film stars Koji Yakusyo as Sugiyama, a straight-up businessman who toils away at his job robotically in order to provide his wife and daughter with the things that are expected of a family man. It's not a bad life, just an ordinary one. While making his way home on the train, he notices a young woman (Tamiyo Kusakari) staring out of a dance-school window. On an impulse one evening, Sugiyama leaves the train to go and find the woman. He winds up enrolling in dance classes -- something he keeps from his family. And while he's no closer to the woman, Mai, he, much to his surprise, begins to enjoy dancing.

Shall We Dance is written and directed by Masayuki Suo. Suo places his characters at counterpoints. There's the fettered Sugiyama and the icy Mai, once a champion dancer forced to work at her father's school instead of pursuing glory. There's the comic forces of the pudgy, pushy Toyoko (Eriko Watanabe) who bullies her classmates, and Sugiyama's coworker Aoki (Naoto Takenaka), a picked-on nerd, who dons wig to become a dancing wild man. As a dance contest nears, all of them must push their conflicts aside, gather the courage to trust their partners, and swallow their anxieties, to dance like they've never danced before.

Shall We Dance draws the viewer in with its almost corny sweetness while demonstrating the release and the beauty of ballroom dance.