The musical is back! Again! As cinemas resume business as (sort of) usual in the latter stages of a pandemic, 2021 is being hyped as some kind of banner year for that most long-suffering of genres – one that, between the instantly legendary calamity of Cats and such lesser recent failures as The Prom, has recently been enduring a distinctly sub-golden age. Amid upcoming film versions of Dear Evan Hansen, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and Tick, Tick … Boom!, hopes are particularly high that the presumed box-office success of Jon M Chu’s In the Heights this summer and Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story at Christmas will relegitimise the grand-scale studio musical. Less commercially minded cinephiles, meanwhile, are awaiting the return of French auteur Leos Carax, set to open the Cannes festival in July with his thrillingly strange-looking Sparks-scored extravaganza Annette.

The last time there was this much industry speculation about the screen musical’s comeback, coincidentally enough, the film at the centre of it was also selected as that year’s Cannes curtain-raiser. It’s exactly 20 years since Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge instantly polarised opinion with its relentless blend of fin de siècle spectacle, Vegas pizzazz and karaoke-bar playlisting, brashly announcing its artistic intentions on the Croisette before asserting itself as one of the most eccentric summer releases ever dealt by a major Hollywood studio.

Through the 1990s, the musical had become largely the preserve of children’s animation, with sporadic exceptions – Alan Parker’s handsome but shrugged-off Evita, Lars von Trier’s nihilistic provocation Dancer in the Dark – that largely proved the rule. Luhrmann’s film, adapted from no source material save for practically every musical ever made, was as much of an anomaly, but a harder one for audiences to ignore: given a vital marketing assist by Missy Elliott and friends’ exhausting, chart-topping cover of Lady Marmalade, this lavishly peculiar curio attained the instant status of a pop culture event, setting up equal, opposing teams of cultish devotion and zealous antipathy. “A wonderful postmodern hug of a movie,” cooed the Washington Post. “A voracious vacuum cleaner of a movie, hoovering up a hundred years’ worth of junk with the same monotonously unmodulated hum,” tutted the Village Voice. Luhrmann’s cinema of excess, it seemed, could inspire both sides to suitably overheated metaphor. That was its magic.

As it turned out, the film’s cultural footprint was larger than its initial box office: it made a respectable $179m worldwide, landing short of the year’s top 20 hits, sandwiched between forgotten nonentities Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Dr Dolittle 2. That’s less than a self-styled “spectacular spectacular” might dream of, but still a pretty remarkable total for a film that practically sets itself up as a folly by design. In 2001, the idea of a studio even wide-releasing a 1900-set romantic musical burlesque – in which a cameo by Kylie Minogue as an absinthe fairy qualifies as one of its more logical creative decisions – was novel. In 2021, it’s unimaginable.

I returned a little nervously to Moulin Rouge after a few years of resisting its boozy pull – for the same reasons one doesn’t eat a favourite rich dessert all that often. I was among the film’s original cultists from my first viewing, aged 18, in a largely bewildered multiplex crowd. Many repeat viewings ensued, and in a 2009 critics’ poll, I declared it the film of the decade. Since then, I’ve found myself defending Luhrmann’s kitsch rhapsody to exasperated friends and colleagues so frequently, I began to worry I’d built my memories of it into another film entirely, one somehow bigger or more transcendent than its already brimming vision.

Yet the pleasing surprise of the film, 20 years on, is that it has hardly dated at all, having been so determinedly out of time in the first place. Luhrmann’s textbook postmodernism, repurposing late 20th-century pop for the essential purposes of early 20th-century opera, practically future-proofed itself: its full-hearted embrace of its own bad taste and shameless anachronism was either its defining charm or its critical failure at first sight. Either you’re sweepingly moved by the sight and sound of Nicole Kidman trilling out One Day I’ll Fly Away into the night, astride a gilded papier-mache elephant, or it makes you curl into a tight ball of mortification, but the reaction is likely to stick. (Either way, you’d be hard-pressed to deny that Kidman – whose post-Cruise reinvention as her generation’s premier risk-taking star Luhrmann’s film launched with a very high kick – is giving it less than her all.)

I remain bedazzled by the film’s absurd indulgence in surface beauty and shine. Luhrmann, never one to under-design a film, leaves no inch of the screen unadorned, meshing costume-jewellery fakery and diamond-cut expense into a single, strangely unified aesthetic that his two subsequent features – 2008’s endearingly retro but passionless epic Australia and 2013’s cluttered, point-missing adaptation of The Great Gatsby – couldn’t quite nail. The music seesaws between gauche Broadway pastiche and infectiously besotted icon homage: it works by channelling a similar spirit of undiscriminating showmanship to the club in which it’s set, a spiritually appropriate intersection of high spirits and low art.

But mostly, Moulin Rouge gets away with its own most reckless impulses thanks to its unembarrassed earnestness of emotion, which is all the more striking given the frequent all-caps irony of its execution. It’s a film that feels like it genuinely believes its own naive, endlessly underlined tenets of Truth! Beauty! Freedom! And Love!, and is prepared to conjure up any amount of gloriously artificial glitter in their honour. That’s a high wire you wouldn’t trust just about any film-maker to walk – Luhrmann included, on an average day. But buoyed by possibly deranged conviction in its own romanticism, and the sincere chemistry between two all-out movie stars giving themselves over the exercise with naff abandon, it all comes together like a one-off perfect trick by a faulty magician.

It remains a fully unrepeatable feat. The inevitable stage version is headed over from Broadway to the West End later this year, but what can it really bring to this everything-and-the-kitchen-sink exercise but a loyal, already primed fanbase? Yet Luhrmann’s film does leave a trail of influence, having effectively legitimised the piecemeal jukebox musical as an artistic and commercial form: the stage iteration of Mamma Mia! may have preceded it by two years, but Luhrmann proved the genre could trade on more than just baked-in nostalgia. It certainly reignited studios’ interest in adult-targeted musicals, if only briefly: its Oscar nominations paved the way for less interesting mega-hit Chicago’s greater triumph the following year, only for dud adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera and The Producers to stall all that momentum.

Since then, the Hollywood musical has settled for occasional commercial peaks – from the ghastly self-importance of Les Misérables to the winning friskiness of La La Land – without ever forming a continuous movement, nor producing one film as gutsily and exhilaratingly committed to the cause as Luhrmann’s. Perhaps one of this year’s crop will launch the genre into a necessary new era, closing the book on two decades of postmodernism and nostalgia – of which Moulin Rouge!, whether you swoon to or recoil from it, remains the definitive work, its exclamation mark both enduringly obnoxious and fully earned.