Youngsters likely to be drawn in by some more smart casting (Amanda Bynes and High School Musical's Zac Ephron) will be unaware how shockingly true this was in a country whose black music had to be covered by white musicians before the majority could hear it. It also provides a sharp reminder of an era when blacks were marginalised, with a hair-care ad that promises: "Every kink will be gone in a blink" and with a "Negro day" allowing black dancers on to the teen dance TV show that obsesses our heroine, played beautifully by newcomer Nikki Blonsky. Typically of a movie full of cross-referencing in-jokes, this means you get a memory blast of Grease 2 as well as Grease, and isn't that the piano-straddling red dress Pfeiffer wore in The Fabulous Baker Boys that she's chosen to seduce Christopher Walken in? Hairspray's full of memory-twiggers like that as well as coming up with a soundtrack, all sung competently by the cast, that parodies its era far better than Dreamgirls did and stirs memories of the half-forgotten (Lesley Gore and Neil Sedaka) as much as more familiar Brill Building classics. The casting is true to Waters too: for the original film's Divine, Adam Shankman gives us a fatsuited John Travolta and for evil station boss Debbie Harry, we get the equally malignant and fun Michelle Pfeiffer. It was anti-fattist, anti-racist and pro all the loopy dance crazes crammed between the Twist and the Beatles' arrival (the "stricken chicken" is one I don't believe it ever existed, but plenty of equally daft ones did). A spirited and enjoyable example of the growing film-to-musical-to-musical-film genre, Hairspray remains faithful to John Waters' 1988 original, which combined a fluffily camp parody of 1962 Baltimore with pointed pleas for tolerance.
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