John Travolta, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken, Nikki Blonsky, Queen Latifah, Amanda Bynes, James Marsden, Alison Janney.

Running time: 107 mins . . . .

"GO for it, " Wilbur Turnblad urges his daughter Tracy. "This is America. You have to think big to be big." The joke is that his chubby bouffant-haired teenage wannabe singer-dancer actually is BIG already: put her on a scales and she'd outweigh Britney Spears and Beyonce combined. Her triumph in a local TV talent show in Adam Shankman's terrific remake of the 1988 John Waters cult comedy Hairspray . . . and its 2002 Broadway musical reincarnation . . . is a delicious subversion of Hollywood's obsessive idealisation of the body beautiful.

Tracy's insistence that if her black school pals can't dance with her on the 'white kids only' show she'll join their civil rights protest march . . . this is segregated Baltimore in 1963 . . .evocatively heightens the frisson without diluting the sheer joy of a musical that bounces from one super song to another instead of being . . . as too often is the case . . .just tedious variations of the same tune (a la Andrew Lloyd Webber).

Hairspray hardly pauses for a breath, right from a hilariously sustained 'Good Morning Baltimore' opening . . . that tracks Tracy getting out of bed, snatching breakfast, hitching a ride to school on a garbage van and arriving in class . . . to the fabulous 'Come So Far, Got So Far To Go' finale. If Shankman . . .originally a dancer . . . doesn't win an Oscar for choreography, it'll be an outrage.

While Nikki Blonksy, plucked from New York highschool anonymity to play Tracy, gives the story its heart . . . she's a natural comic with a captivating voice and grace of movement . . .Hairspray's real strength is as a superbly cast ensemble piece, bristling with colourful characters and lively vignettes.

Lured back to a musical role 30 years after Grease, John Travolta in drag, ironing underwear and too fat to leave the house, delivers a teasingly coy reprise of the transsexual Divine's icon role as Tracy's mother. Christopher Walken revels in the incongruities of being Travolta's loving joke-shop husband . . .touchingly expressed in their duet 'You're Timeless To Me' . . .while fighting off with a talking doll and a turd attempts by conniving TV studio boss Michelle Pfeiffer to seduce him (it's all part of a diabolical plot to sabotage Tracy's chances of becoming Miss Teenage Hairspray).

Amanda Bynes has little to do as Tracy's dorky girlfriend but does it brilliantly with the help of a lollipop, which she sucks with seeming wide-eyed innocence while gawping at groovy black dancer Elijah Woods. James Marsden is convincingly cool in a bland 1960s way as the cocky host of the Corny Collins show, while Zac Efron (High School Musical) has a dreamy sensitivity as the show's heartthrob star that makes his attraction to Tracy touchingly believable.

Queen Latifah exudes earthy charisma as Motormouth Mabelle . . . she's hostess of a black dancers-only monthly Negro Night show . . . but also poignancy, particularly in her rendering of the civil rights song 'I Know Where I've Been'.

John Waters pops up in a mischievous cameo as the neighbourhood flasher, while Jerry Stiller, who played Tracy's father in the 1988 movie, is Mr Pinky, proprietor of a store for larger women's clothing. John Travolta getting fitted for Tracy's big night becomes a playful spoof of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. Rikki Lake, the original Tracy, pops up too as a William Morris talent agent.

Hairspray is peppered with witty oneliners but never gets bogged down in its own cleverness. The music, the songs and the dialogue come out of the action rather than dictate it. It has a throwaway charm that's contagious. It's the kind of movie that sends you away humming.