Singing “Maria,” his voice soaring into the upper register, Tony is transported, and so are we. At the high-school dance, which Spielberg stages with a hip-twirling electricity that rivals the big school dance number in “Grease” (yes, that’s a compliment), Tony has his first glimpse of Maria ( Rachel Zegler), the girl who will burn down what’s left of his gang loyalty, and she has her first glimpse of him, and…well, it could all spearhead a revival of love at first sight. Tony, updated by Kushner’s script, has now spent a year in prison for nearly punching someone to death, and Elgort, speaking in understated street vowels, strikes just the right balance of sweetness and danger. But in “West Side Story,” Elgort, with lips like Brando’s, has a brooding heart and personality that pop, and he’s a wonderfully expressive crooner. One’s first thought about him may be that he’s Ashton Kutcher without irony - and that you miss the irony. Before now, I’ve never been a fan of Ansel Elgort. And Spielberg has done an ace job of casting his two romantic leads. Of course, at the center of “West Side Story” is something - maybe I should say “Somewhere” - softer and more tenderly lyrical. The racial antagonism he faces each day has singed his soul, and Alvarez infuses the character with a dark-side-of-rock-star bravado. Bernardo is now a boxer (fighting is what gets him high), and his problem is that he has never embraced his life in America. (The 1961 “West Side Story” felt dated…in 1961.) As Riff, the leader of the Jets, Mike Faist has a lean sociopathic squint, and David Alvarez plays Bernardo, leader of the Sharks, with a mean swagger of self-righteousness. We seem to be gliding through the streets right along with the Jets, channeling their reckless exhilaration, and the ’50s-punk acting has been liberated so that the snarls and struts aren’t trapped in that bubble of old-movie corniness. As the boys move and groove to their inner thug, singing “Jet Song” (“When you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way…”), Justin Peck’s choreography plays off the hypnotic, limb-thrusting, rhythm-of-the-city athleticism of Jerome Robbins’ original dances, and Spielberg, working with his dynamic cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, has the camera moves to match. The Jets start off slathering paint on the mural of a Puerto Rican flag. Both are being crushed by gentrification - which is to say, part of their tragic folly is they never realize they’re in the same boat. The turf war between the film’s white and Puerto Rican teenage gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, now has a bigger-picture backdrop.

Robert Wise’s 1961 screen version opened with that God’s-eye panoramic sweep of Manhattan, but Spielberg’s opens with a panorama of rubble, the camera swooping over what looks like a war zone, which turns out to be the wrecking-ball “slum clearance” that will make way for the construction of Lincoln Center. The setting is the Upper West Side in 1957, something the film lets us know with a wink that nods to how Spielberg and Kushner are going to tinker with the material.

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