Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, and Carey Mulligan. Rated PG.

Maybe it’s a 3-D contact high from all the champagne and “nerve pill”–popping in The Great Gatsby, but Baz Luhrmann’s crazy movie is weirdly hard to hate. In fact, as you’re wondering exactly which trade agreement allows slightly bananas Australian directors to turn classic American novels into 3-D movies, you realize that in some ways this Gatsby is kind of great. And, yeah, it’s got some parties going on.

Turns out the director who never saw a confetti cannon he didn’t like may actually get the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel. The Fitzgerald vibrations of 1920s jazz-and-crime culture and shiny American crassness are definitely vibrating on-screen and, thanks to that 3-D, in your face. The Long Island party scenes alone—flappers, techno, Jay-Z, camera gymnastics—are simultaneously intoxicating and a bit like getting a blow-dart of some Amazonian paralysis drug to the neck.

Did the actors need on-set sensory-deprivation tanks to even act in this fifth Gatsby film? As Nick Carraway, narrator of the tragic tale of self-reinvented millionaire Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), Tobey Maguire is charmingly boring, which is possible. Playing Daisy Buchanan, Gatsby’s impossible-dream girl, Carey Mulligan empathetically manages to spoil our usual desire to smack Daisy. Joel Edgerton is excellent as Daisy’s entitled, brutish husband, Tom; Indian star Amitabh Bachchan (Gatsby’s gangster partner) is a great, strange surprise; and Elizabeth Debicki (Daisy’s confidante and superior human) deserves her own movie.

Because somebody had to, DiCaprio gets the soul of Fitzgerald’s creation. He embodies Gatsby’s golden, hopeful boyishness, tinged with those creeping uncertainties of adulthood. And in the end (after that fateful car ride), it’s not the parties—it’s never the parties—it’s the hope in DiCaprio’s very blue eyes, the hope of love at the other end of a ringing telephone. As Jack White sings, and everything fades away: “Love is blindness/I don’t wanna see.”

Maybe it was all just the nerve pills—but they were pretty good nerve pills.