In 1990, hip-hop was a subculture striving to breach the mainstream without losing its soul. The music had matured at breakneck speed in the 1980s. Rappers pushed past boasts and chants with storytelling, complex wordplay and sociopolitical consciousness, as producers vastly extended the sound-collage possibilities of sampling. “Yo! MTV Raps,” which started in 1988, was expanding the hip-hop audience beyond its urban core, and MC Hammer had a worldwide hit with “U Can’t Touch This.” But at the same time the crack epidemic was closing down the New York City clubs that had been hip-hop laboratories, while radio stations still resisted hip-hop’s genuine innovators and major labels considered hip-hop a novelty that would run its course. Everyone involved was inventing the music and the business on the spot.  That’s the backdrop for “The Breaks,” a TV movie produced by VH1 that has its premiere on Monday. It’s an affectionate, determinedly credible period piece with lightly fictionalized versions of people and places from the era. It’s also what one of its executive producers, the journalist and author Dan Charnas, describes as a “backdoor pilot,” a two-hour film introducing characters and plotlines that, if well received, could be the basis for a continuing series. VH1 will make that decision after the premiere. “Within a week we should probably have a good idea of whether it goes forward or not,” Seith Mann, its screenwriter and director, said.  “The Breaks” arrives after — and perhaps catches momentum from — two flashier hip-hop narratives: “Empire,” the bling-laden hip-hop soap opera on Fox, and “Straight Outta Compton,” the hugely profitable biopic about the West Coast gangsta rappers N. W. A. Mr. Mann has directed episodes of “The Wire,” “Homeland,” “Friday Night Lights” and “Californication.”  The story is by Mr. Mann and Mr. Charnas, and is loosely derived from Mr. Charnas’s authoritative, extensively researched 2010 book, “The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop.” Some of Mr. Charnas’s souvenirs of the era, like a jacket from Profile Records (where he worked) and an E-mu SP-1200 sampler, show up on screen. “We were meticulous about constructing this world,” Mr. Charnas said by telephone.  “The Breaks” features three friends for whom hip-hop is as much a mission as a career. It centers on Nikki Jones (played by Afton Williamson), an ambitious, radiant, newly graduated salutatorian who says she has chosen hip-hop over law school. Ms. Williamson said by phone that she grew up in a religious household where she wasn’t allowed to listen to secular music, but soaked up the hip-hop of groups like Salt-N-Pepa while visiting a cousin. “I was, like, 8, and just watching it and being obsessed,” she said. “I was in awe of all of these women with the baggy clothes and the big earrings, and they just were loud, and people listened to them. I thought that was so cool.”  Nikki’s boyfriend, David Aaron (David Call), is interning at an R&B radio station; their friend DeeVee (Mack Wilds) is an aspiring producer recording in a garage. Wood Harris, who was the drug dealer Avon Barksdale in “The Wire,” plays the streetwise, manic hip-hop manager Barry Fouray, Nikki’s new employer. Antoine Harris (unrelated to Wood Harris) plays Ahm, a cold-eyed, scar-faced gang leader who turns out to be a first-rate rapper.  Method Man, from the Wu-Tang Clan, shows up as DeeVee’s exasperated, disapproving father, and for more Oedipal tension, David’s father, Juggy (Evan Handler), is a corrupt record-promotion man from the payola era. The score is by D.J. Premier, who was the producer half of Gang Starr in the 1990s, and convincing new 1990s-style raps were written by Phonte, from the group Little Brother and, more recently, Foreign Exchange. Otherwise, the soundtrack — with songs from acts like Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest and Poor Righteous Teachers — is historically accurate. “If it didn’t come out before fall of 1990, we weren’t going to use it,” Mr. Mann said.  Bill Adler, a onetime publicist turned journalist and hip-hop documentarian whose archive was purchased by Cornell University, praised “The Breaks” for recreating the 1990s. “They captured the feel of the rap record business and rap management at the time,” he said. “It’s true to reality, just because it was so low-tech and there were so few people involved.” He added, “The notion that this could launch a series is exciting to me, because it will embody that old ideal of ‘Edutainment’” — the title of a 1990 album by Boogie Down Productions.  Mr. Adler noted, however, that while “The Breaks” presents the conflict between MC Hammer’s pop version of hip-hop and more street-level rapping, it neglects another 1990 cultural rivalry: between the Afro-centric, consciousness-raising New York style of groups like Public Enemy and the rise of tough-talking gangsta rap in Los Angeles. N. W. A’s debut, “Straight Outta Compton,” had been released in 1988. “It turned into a fight between New York and Los Angeles,” Mr. Adler said. “New York lost, and didn’t recover.”  VH1 had already optioned “The Big Payback” when the channel’s producers met with Mr. Mann. “Hip-hop was my music,” Mr. Mann said by telephone. “I grew up with it and was a lover of it early on.” He had long wanted to make a historical series about hip-hop: “a ‘Boardwalk Empire’ of hip-hop,” he said.  He discovered “The Big Payback” on his own. “I read Dan’s book like a page-turner,” he said. “I just couldn’t put it down.” At the meeting with VH1, Mr. Mann pulled out his own copy of the book, heavily underlined. “We were all saying the same thing,” he recalled.  “The Big Payback” spans 40 years, up to the 2008 election of Barack Obama. But Mr. Charnas, who came up with the main characters in his treatment, had historical and personal reasons to set “The Breaks” in 1990.  “It was a very important and very little-known fulcrum point for hip-hop,” Mr. Charnas said. “It is the point where hip-hop has achieved this critical mass of creativity and commercial success without any help from the existing institutions of the music business, aside from ‘Yo! MTV Raps.’ Black radio has played hip-hop on the weekends and in drive time, but is now backing away from it. Pop radio has always held hip-hop at bay. And now that MC Hammer is out, that is what they’re choosing to play.”  It was also the time that Mr. Charnas arrived in New York City, fresh out of college, like Nikki Jones in “The Breaks.” “There was this feeling of, ‘What’s the next step?’” Mr. Charnas said. “We know that hip-hop is basically America’s next teen musical culture, if not the next rock ’n’ roll. How do we get Public Enemy or Queen Latifah or Cypress Hill or any of these guys to their rightful audience?”  VH1 had its own incentive to set “The Breaks” in 1990. “The VH1 viewer — apparently their coming-of-age was around the early 1990s,” Mr. Charnas said. “So the VH1 viewer has a lot of nostalgia for that period. At least, so I was told. That early-1990s time hits their sweet spot.”  “The Breaks” goes hopscotching among streets, offices, studios, clubs and housing projects, between velvet-rope luxury and gang violence, using as many New York City locations as it can. Part of its visual style, Mr. Mann said, was inspired by the photographer Vivian Maier, who often photographed street scenes.  “It was approaching every scene with the intention of keeping as much of the environment in the frame as possible, even when I was being intimate with the characters,” Mr. Mann said. “You can’t tell the story of the golden age of hip-hop in New York without feeling the city.”  A quarter-century has taken its toll on the streetscape. Between scouting and shooting at one Bleecker Street sidewalk location, Mr. Charnas said, a bike lane had been installed. It was also difficult to get rights to use some 1980s and 1990s music because, at the time, the legal mechanisms around sampling had not been systematized, and the copyright status of some songs remains in limbo even now. When “The Breaks” couldn’t get clearance for a desired track that mattered, Mr. Charnas said, it would sometimes license the underlying, sampled song for an instrumental snippet.  That level of detail has gone into “The Breaks.” But the prospective series will depend on balancing history and invention. “The life of this could go on and on,” Ms. Williamson said. “Music changes so much. Hip-hop changes so much.”  A version of this article appears in print on January 4, 2016, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Year Hip-Hop Found Its Flow. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The movie, the basis of a possible series, dramatizes the year 1990, when rap music was suspended between its gritty urban roots and mainstream acceptance.