Among the many movies that sat on the shelf while the Covid-19 pandemic kept theaters closed, two were particularly poignant: Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical In the Heights and Steven Spielberg’s production of West Side Story. Both were set among Latinx communities in New York City, and they filmed alongside each other on location in 2019. These twin celebrations of dense, dancing urban life would have to wait until we could literally breathe again.

My hunch was that In the Heights would emerge the winner. West Side Story is a classic but problematic musical, with a 1961 film adaptation that’s become iconic. Brilliant as he is, Spielberg’s made some of his biggest blunders when he’s tried to Spielberg-ize well-known stories; In the Heights is an exuberant musical that’s been overshadowed by the titanic follow-up Hamilton.

Released June, In the Heights proved a commercial flop; the surging Delta variant didn’t help, nor did an overweighted expansion of its story, though its musical numbers were even more thrilling than I’d dared to hope. Now, at last, we have West Side Story - a movie at once much heavier in tone and more dexterous in its negotiation of a sprawling scenario. While there are certainly some big numbers, Spielberg’s West Side Story feels almost like a chamber piece, with the director’s incredibly nimble camera following the characters through a maze of interior spaces.

As much as this is Spielberg’s West Side Story, though, it’s Tony Kushner’s. The acclaimed playwright completely revamped the story’s script; while the characters and plot remain essentially the same, Kushner’s take reframes the tragic story in the context of class and a more nuanced view on race. Busting an early melee between the Jets and the Sharks, the cops make it clear: gentrification is coming for all of them, and if they keep fighting over the crumbs society has allowed them, they’ll be left behind.

Pointedly, Kushner also makes clear that the cops are racist; they tell the Jets, in essence, to use their white privilege and climb up over the backs of the Puerto Rican Sharks. That doesn’t seem so easy for the working-class Jets, whose lives have been marked by neglect and hardship. They can’t fight the system, but they can fight the Sharks.

Against this backdrop emerge Tony (Ansel Elgort) and Maria (Rachel Zegler, cast by design as an unknown teenager). One of Kushner’s smartest tweaks is to have Tony newly emerged from a prison stint for battery; that piece of personal history both explains why Tony has a different philosophy about gang violence and establishes the premise that he’s capable of it. His resentful friend Riff is played by Mike Faist with a face as sharp as his knife; at a key moment, Spielberg has Tony see Riff through a shelf, a bright light shining on the latter’s face as though he’s already receding from the world.

The Sharks, meanwhile, are explicitly described as having ganged up only because they had to resist the existing white gang - a realistic allusion to the origins of many urban gangs. The Sharks and their families often speak in Spanish, without subtitles; the script ensures that Anglophones figure out what’s going on, but asks us to meet the Puerto Ricans on their own terms.

David Alvarez is fine as Sharks leader Bernardo, but it’s Anita (Ariana DeBose) who emerges as the key character in their circle. Unlike the typical West Side Story where the creative team succumbs to the temptation to wring Anita for broad laughs from the beginning, Spielberg, Kushner, and DeBose keep Anita rooted in reality. Her showcase number “America” (with DeBose costumed in a yellow dress that recalls Beyoncé’s “Hold Up” showstopper) lands all the more powerfully because we understand Anita as a complex character who appreciates the ironies of her community being pulled between Puerto Rico and “America” when the commonwealth is, after all, part of America.

Rita Moreno won an Oscar (part of her complete EGOT) for playing Anita in the 1961 movie; she’s back in the role of Valentina, owner of the drugstore where the neighborhood kids hang out. Gratifyingly, Kushner and Spielberg have made Moreno’s role far more than a winking cameo: she’s the very heart of the picture, singing the heartbreaking song “Somewhere” in a stunning rendition that evokes the weight of generations. Where, when, will there be a safe haven free of racial violence?

Both In the Heights and West Side Story embrace their urban setting. Whereas In the Heights celebrates a contemporary Manhattan, West Side Story imagines a Manhattan of dreams - good dreams and bad. The wrecking ball haunts these characters, who need only step outside their front door to see the rising tide of urban renewal. (In a classic Spielberg shot, one of the areas being cleared is revealed to be the future site of Lincoln Center, where West Side Story composer Leonard Bernstein held court.) Light doesn’t pour into this world so much as it pierces, suddenly illuminating and then retreating just as quickly.

It might have seemed like a gimmick to cast a complete newcomer as Maria, but it works: like Tony, we’ve never seen this face before, and we’re utterly captivated. Neither Zegler nor Elgort overplay the pathos, holding as much hope as they can without daring to dream that it will be enough. Spielberg takes advantage of his medium by bringing the camera in close (though not awkwardly, Jennifer-Hudson-in-Cats, close) and encouraging his cast to deliver Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics with a conversational intimacy that’s impossible on stage.

Scene after scene is reinvented to land with the impact of the original, but in an new context. “I Feel Pretty” becomes a romp through a department store where Maria and her peers work as overnight cleaners. “One Hand, One Heart” is set before a stained-glass window in a museum - and it’s Maria who initiates the young couple’s wedding vows, in Spanish. “Cool” becomes a gravity-defying contest of wills between Riff and Tony, who dance over highly symbolic holes in a pier as they fight for possession of the Chekhovian gun. Choreographer Justin Peck pays homage to Jerome Robbins’s foundational work without being wedded to it; these characters dance free of their forebears with movement made for the camera.

Did West Side Story need to be remade? The question makes me think of Roger Ebert’s observation on “gratuitous” violence in the movies: “Everything in a movie or on a television show is gratuitous. That is, nothing is necessary.” Need is relative; Spielberg’s dedication to his father might help explain why he felt the need to revisit this show, a plea for peace created by a pair of towering Jewish American artists, Bernstein and Sondheim. You may not need to go to see it, but I don’t think you’ll regret it if you do. I don’t think you’ll regret it at all.