Film

There’s a lot of star power in the cast of Hairspray, but the movie belongs to newcomer Blonsky. As young Tracy Turnblad, a plus-size teen in 1962 Baltimore who dreams of being on the local version of American Bandstand, she’s like a walking exclamation point. Much of the prerelease attention has focused on Travolta’s drag turn as Tracy’s mother, Edna, but he’s outgunned here. Stuffed into a fat suit, he’s made the source of fun in a way that seems weirdly off in a musical with a fat-positive message and a genuine—and genuinely charming—big girl as its true star.

Tracy wants to get on the Corny Collins Show, where a group of scrubbed, conventionally cute teens (all white) dance every afternoon (except on the monthly “Negro Day”). As the show’s catchy theme song puts it, they’re “the nicest kids in town.” Tracy hopes to catch the eye of dreamboat Link (Efron), but she gets tangled up in race relations when she befriends African-American teen Seaweed (Kelley) and ends up in a civil-rights march protesting the TV station’s segregation of the show.

Shankman’s direction is workmanlike, moving crisply from musical number to musical number (at times it feels more like a musical revue than a full-blown story). His choreography gets a bit repetitive, but the movie is carried along by the sheer force of Blonsky’s enthusiasm, with able backup from Efron, Kelley, Latifah and (surprise!) Marsden as the white-bread Corny Collins.