Adam Shankman's Hairspray is supposedly based on the 1988 film that pitched the Bard of Baltimore, John Waters, into the mainstream. But, though there are fleeting glimpses of Waters and his star, Ricki Lake, this new version has more in common with the sanitised stage adaptation that came later (and arrives in London later this year after scoring a hit on Broadway).

There's wit here, and a fair amount of entertainment to be had, but don't expect the feral spikiness of the original, as Shankman, a choreographer as well as director, aims to please the very audience whom Waters usually tries to shock.

He hits his target squarely, illustrating the style and absurd fashions of the early Sixties with a precision that avoids parody and is worth the price of admission by itself. And no one will cavil at the performance of Nikki Blonsky as the plump Tracy, whose dream is to appear as a dancer on The Corny Collins Show, a daytime television dance party that wows every teen in Baltimore. Blonsky - an ice-cream vendor before she got this role - gives us a wonderfully apt portrait of the girl who's as big-hearted as she is plussized.

Gallery: Men dressed as Women

She helps Motormouth Maybelle (Queen Latifah) integrate her black dancers into a show which has previously given them one reluctant night a month. "If any more whites come into this room, we'll have to call it a suburb," says Maybelle when Tracy, her friend Penny (Amanda Bynes) and Tracy's parents (John Travolta and Christopher Walken) join the battle for integration.

Yes, you have read it right. Travolta takes his turn in a musical once again, as Tracy's mother, decked out like an American version of a fuller-bodied Old Mother Riley. The scenes between him and Walken take on a surreal humour of their own.

The villain of the piece is Michelle Pfeiffer's bitchy, fading (but still pretty beautiful) Velma, who runs the WYZT station and wants her daughter Amber (Brittany Snow) to win the Miss Teenage Hairspray contest by fair means or foul. But she can't, since Corny Collins himself (James Marsden, with a quiff to die for) falls for Tracy, and so does the audience.

The musical numbers, with songs and lyrics from Marc Shaiman, are perfectly judged, and all the better for being let rip straight, without the fussy camera angles of the MTV style. Admittedly, there's not one outstanding number - but there's nothing hopeless either, and that adds to the zippy panache of the show.

And Hairspray, of course, is primarily a show.

Though impeccably liberal in intent, its argument is so well accepted now that you can only be surprised that Baltimore in the early Sixties was quite so full of television executives who regarded blacks as if from another planet. If it reminds us of that, it will have served its ancillary purpose. The main one, however, is to entertain, and that it certainly does.