As the kids never used to say: it’s all gone a bit Pete Tong. Dance music culture is at least 30 years old, and yet there has barely been a piece of cinema that has meaningfully portrayed the last great revolutionary musical movement. Tong himself asked, in a recent Billboard editorial, why in the age of EDM – the catch-all term under which “electronic dance music” finally stormed the US mainstream – the genre hadn’t had its big-screen coronation. “Where’s our Saturday Night Fever? Where’s our Empire? Where’s our Do the Right Thing or Hustle & Flow?”

That coronation may have finally arrived. This month sees the release of Eden, covering 20 years in the life of a DJ in the Parisian “French touch” scene. It’s director Mia Hansen-Løve’s film-à-clef tribute to her brother Sven, whose mythic Cheers nights fed off the same love for New York garage and Chicago house that propelled peers Daft Punk to global fame. Labelling it an “EDM movie” is a bit crass given the precise section of electronic-music history covered by the film, but that is how the internet is pigeonholing it. Embracing the term, however, is We Are Your Friends, named after the 2006 Justice vs Simian hit and starring Zac Efron as EDM hotshot Cole Carter, possessed of Jedi-like sensitivity regarding his BPM choices, but indignant about selling out.

Many observers pinpoint David Guetta’s (another French touch alumnus) production of Black-Eyed Peas’ I Gotta Feeling in 2009 as the moment electronic music’s spacey continuum infiltrated the US pop mainstream, leading to an outbreak of trancey meltdowns on tracks by Rihanna, Nicki Minaj and a million others. The new mood of serotonin-flooded euphoria at EDM strongholds such as Electric Daisy Carnival was satirised in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (soundtracked by Skrillex), and it now looks as if Hollywood is the next step. Sony has cued up EDM romcom I’m in Love With the DJ, produced by Will Ferrell. The DJ and producer Diplo is developing a feature for Fox about three teens trying to get into one of his shows, while Warner has picked up the rights to the story of cross-dressing Cuban DJ Tatiana.

Why the sea change? Max Joseph, We Are Your Friends’ 33-year-old writer-director, signed on because that’s what he listens to. It’s a turnaround from the mid-90s when mainstream America was deeply suspicious of rave – not just because of the drugs, but because it was rooted in black and gay subcultures of Detroit and Chicago that even white early adopters remained estranged from.

In the UK, where dance quickly found acceptance and strongly influenced design and advertising, cinema remained mainly untouched. It took until 1999 for Human Traffic to properly capture the bleary pleasures of a night larging it – all the more strange as the experience was by then so normalised that director Justin Kerrigan could set his film not at superclubs such as Cream or Pacha, but in the clubs, pubs and house parties of Cardiff. “It was a prerequisite that all the actors had done the drugs, and the extras there really are on ecstasy,” he said at the time. “It’s never been represented before in Britain. And so many people were going to be watching for that authenticity.”

Authenticity is certainly a pitfall for film producers when tackling touchy, fast-moving subcultures – and still is, judging by the knives being sharpened for We Are Your Friends on Pitchfork (“It posits Justice and LCD Soundsystem as the main cultural touchstones of influences, which should tell you as much as you need to know”). But hopefully, this will be less of a factor as the distance between club kids and film-makers continues to narrow.

Perhaps the real difficulty is the challenge of structuring the experience of a modern dancefloor. How a few hours in a single space can become epic emotional terrain, and a social activity become deeply interior. Film-makers can be led astray by clubs being highly visual, strobe-strafed environments, as Hansen-Løve – who began attending her brother’s parties aged 15 – told Rolling Stone: “Most movies about nightclubs create some fantasy world that doesn’t fit with anything that I’ve experienced in the past.” She straddles the contradictions to produce something both grand and intimate: a Goodfellas or Casino of DJ life, a cross-decade epic that not only chronicles how the French refashioned US garage and house into the exquisite dancefloor patisserie of the “filter disco” style, but lets that exultant melancholy drift out into the Parisian streets and the faltering relationships of its protagonist, Paul. Everyone in the film moves on but him, but even when he’s a jaded, coke-addicted thirtysomething, music stays potent; a hotline to youth’s optimism, a pledge that – like staring at a needle on blemishless vinyl – time can stand still.

Sven Hansen-Løve, mixing in a few beats of DJ Proust, sums up the film and the times as a search for a “paradis perdu”. It’s certainly the most successful attempt yet to get inside dance music’s head, to get past clubbing’s ecclesiastical appeal and understand the solipsistic side. But it doesn’t have much competition outside of individual scenes in the likes of Trainspotting, Blade and The 25th Hour, as well as the mixed record of the low-budget posse. Human Traffic is much-loved (for introducing the world to Danny Dyer – the gift who kept on giving – as much as anything else), but it’s a collection of wryly observed, pilled-up vignettes stylistically indebted to Trainspotting, rather than a complete drama. The 2004 Canadian faux-documentary It’s All Gone Pete Tong arguably does a better job of focusing on one story – Paul Kaye’s mad-fer-it Ibiza spinner reacclimatising to real life after going deaf – though the nature of that story leads the film away from the dancefloor.

All of these films pay homage to the inner journey every DJ aims to take his or her audience on; it remains to be seen if We Are Your Friends will be a true believer on that score. The publicity shows an alarming tone designed to chime with the EDM generation, coming across as a business seminar as much as a trailer. The narration talks of apps, startups and quick windfalls; there’s lots of angsty millennial bleating about “Are we ever going to be better than this?” and “We’re not going to be millionaires! It is not going to happen!” It is shaping up to be like The Social Network with bass drops.

Technology made dance music possible in the first place, so perhaps bringing money into the equation shouldn’t be a shock as EDM grows. But if it wants to avoid the Hollywood hard sell, the new crop of EDM films can’t neglect the music’s human side. Particularly the utopian, anti-hierarchical mores of the rave scene that some believed could remake society and whose idealism still lingered in the mid-noughties. As the Streets’ Weak Become Heroes notes during its panoramic paean to a proper night out: “They could settle wars with this/ If only they will imagine the world’s leaders on pills.” It’s not right that the most astute, cinematic description of the lost rave paradise is still in a song.

• Eden is out on 24 July; We Are Your Friends on 28 August