The story begins with Baby, a young girl traveling for the summer to a country club with her family. "That was the summer of 1963, when everyone called me Baby and it didn't occur to me to mind. That was before Kennedy was shot, before the Beatles came, when I couldn't wait to join the Peace Corps, and I thought I'd never find a guy as great as my dad." This opening monologue really sets her up to be the naive little girl, but of course we know it won't stay that way. She meets Johnny Castle and falls head over heels when she agrees to help him with a dance. She finally sees herself as a young woman when dancing with this man.
She finally decides to help with this dance because his partner Penny is pregnant and must miss the performance to get a secret abortion. However, it goes wrong and she has to go to her father and reveal what she has been doing in secret. She risks losing her parents trust to do what she knows to be right. This is when she decides what her priorities are and what is really important to her. The summer progresses and eventually ends with the big dance number at the end and the famous line "Nobody puts Baby in a corner". This is when she finally comes into herself and grows up and shows everyone that she is no longer the scared little girl that arrived at the start of the summer.
This movie is really about discovering who you are, who you want to be, and deciding what is best and what you believe. It's really a story about growing up, finding yourself and breaking other people's views of you--something that is very hard to do at our age. I think that's why this movie has stood the test of time--because it's a constant for people of our age to feel lost or uncertain until suddenly one day we open our eyes and emerge fully as ourselves.
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