That Hairspray is good-hearted is no surprise. Adam Shankman's film, lovingly adapted from the Broadway musical, preserves the inclusive, celebratory spirit of John Waters's 1988 movie, in which bigger-boned, darker-skinned and otherwise different folk take exuberant revenge on the bigots and the squares who conspire to keep them down. The surprise may be that this Hairspray, stuffed with shiny showstoppers, Kennedy-era Baltimore beehives and a heavily padded John Travolta in drag, is actually good.
Appropriately enough for a movie with such a democratic sensibility, there is plenty of credit to go around. Shankman, drawing on long experience as a choreographer, avoids the kind of vulgar overstatement that so often turns the joy of live musical theater into torment at the multiplex. The songs, by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, are usually adequate, occasionally inspired and only rarely inane. And they are sung with impeccable diction and unimpeachable conviction by a lively young cast that includes Nikki Blonsky, Amanda Bynes, Zac Efron and the phenomenally talented Elijah Kelley.
Of course there are better-known, more-seasoned performers on hand as well, notably Queen Latifah, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken and Travolta. But Hairspray is fundamentally a story about being young - about the triumph of youth culture, about the optimistic, possibly dated belief that the future will improve on the present - and its heart is very much with its teenage heroes and the fresh-faced actors who play them.
Blonsky, a ball of happy, mischievous energy, is Tracy Turnblad, a hefty Baltimore high school student whose dream is to dance with the city's most telegenic teenyboppers on The Corny Collins Show. Bynes plays Penny Pingleton, Tracy's timid best friend, whose prim mother (Allison Janney) won't even let Penny watch the show, much less appear on it. Pingleton can scarcely imagine that her daughter will eventually fall for Seaweed (Kelley), part of a group of black kids whom Tracy befriends in the detention hall after school.
As Penny and Seaweed test the taboo against interracial romance, Tracy and Link Larkin (Efron), a Corny Collins dreamboat, take on the tyranny of slenderness. That Hairspray cheerfully conflates racial prejudice with fat-phobia is the measure of its guileless, deliberately simplified politics. Upholding both forms of discrimination is Velma Von Tussle (Pfeiffer), a television station executive who uses The Corny Collins Show - against the wishes of Corny (James Marsden) himself - as a way of maintaining the color line and promoting the celebrity of her blond, smiley daughter, Amber (Brittany Snow).
Hairspray does not seriously propose that Tracy and her new African-American friends face equivalent forms of injustice. But it does make the solidarity between them feel like an utterly natural, intuitive response to the meanness and arrogance of their common enemies. "Welcome to the Sixties," Tracy sings to her mother, conjuring up the New Frontier hopefulness of that decade's early years rather than the violence and paranoia of its denouement.
In freezing history at a moment of high possibility - a moment whose glorious popular culture encompasses West Side Story and the Twist, early Motown and Phil Spector's Wall of Sound - Hairspray is at once knowingly corny and unabashedly utopian. On The Corny Collins Show Seaweed and his friends are relegated to a once-a-month Negro Day, presided over by Motormouth Maybelle (Queen Latifah). Tracy envisions a future when, as she puts it, "every day is Negro Day."
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