Pure joy, held together by lots of beauty products. John Waters’ effervescent musical revels in great ’60s pop, bad acting, outrageous hairdos and a “pleasantly plump” teen girl (a luminous Ricki Lake) in 1962 Baltimore who yearns to earn a spot on an “American Bandstand”-type dance show. It’s a message movie too, laboriously about the era of segregation but more potently about the soullessness of Barbie culture. Lake’s Tracy Turnblad shakes her considerable stuff – and shops at the Hefty Hideaway – with pride, and my favorite touch is the way the studly boys at the dance show don’t give her size a second thought. With Deborah Harry as a preening mother, Jerry Stiller as Tracy’s dad and Waters’ go-to drag queen Divine as Tracy’s mom, not even bothering to hide his afternoon stubble.
