Disney's newly released teen musical "Swing Kids" is set in, of all places, Nazi Germany. But audiences dreading a 90s remake of "Springtime for Hitler" needn't worry. Screenwriter Jonathan Marc Feldman took his cue from an obscure journal article about a marginal subculture of recalcitrant German youths who slipped through the cracks of the Hitler Youth movement. The "Swing Kids" affected long hair, jitterbugged in peg-pants with baggy knees and lived for American swing music, which the Nazis eventually outlawed as "anarchic." By the start of the war, most had either been shunted into the Hitler Youth, dispatched to the army or sent to work camps. The movie, set in prewar Hamburg, is unusually effective in bringing the period and the moral dilemmas faced by its youthful protagonists home to a young generation now inclined to dismiss this era as ancient, irrelevant history. Director Thomas Carter helps his case by casting American actors and avoiding phony German accents. In doing so, he has fashioned a potent parable about perennial youth disaffection. Movies and television have often portrayed the Nazis as stupid, brutish thugs who somehow absconded with an entire country. Admirably, Carter and Feldman take a different tack, addressing the seductive power of fascism. This is so powerfully presented, however, that they render the hero's final gesture of defiance unbelievable. Sheli Teitelbaum / Los Angeles