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Thirty years ago, Baz Luhrmann reinvented Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as a gangbanger love tragedy of the present day, with Mexico City standing in for an imaginary urban place called Verona Beach. The result was a terrific success, more of a success, I suspect, than Luhrmann ever had again; it was irreverent and questioning in just the right way, a sunburst of energy, but instinctively respectful to the story, with Luhrmann cutting the original text with co-screenwriter Craig Pearce but not changing or modernising it. It is full of life, extravagantly joyful, then passionately sad, and its lurid 90s crime-chic design doesn’t look dated. And in this Romeo and Juliet, Luhrmann never suspended the forward momentum to indulge campy musical setpieces, perhaps because Shakespeare’s language is the music and the dance; the text keeps the interpretation grounded.

The 21-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio, yet to have his massive breakthrough in Titanic (another story of starcrossed lovers), plays young Romeo Montague, whose family is locked into an unexplained Sicilian-style blood feud with the Capulet family. Romeo is a young idler and would-be poet, scribbling lines of verse into a notebook, and at this stage dreamily moping over a young woman called Rosaline, whose silent offstage existence is the play’s minor incidental mystery. (Brian Dennehy and Christina Pickles play his parents and they have much less of a role than the elder Capulets.)

Claire Danes, at 16, played Juliet Capulet – she had already been the piteous Beth in Little Women opposite Winona Ryder, but had become a huge star due to playing the lead in TV’s cult teen classic My So-Called Life. This was the film that really introduced audiences to her intelligence and beauty and to her unmistakable tearfulness: that verge-of-a-sneeze nose wrinkling and lip trembling that came before crying. Juliet’s mother is played by Diane Venora and her dad by the formidable Paul Sorvino, bringing a lot of the glowering paterfamilias presence he showed as gangboss Paulie Cicero in Scorsese’s Goodfellas – though here he has longer hair and a more florid Italianate accent.

A relatively minor fracas between the two families’ hothead younger contingents brings down a furious official sanction on them both, and Capulet senior is resentfully compelled to invite some Montagues to his ball; it is here where we meet some of the exotic minor characters. Harold Perrineau is queer or queer-adjacent Mercutio, whose Queen Mab speech celebrates MDMA euphoria; John Leguizamo is a black-clad, snake-hipped Tybalt, cousin of Juliet, always looking for a quarrel with his enemies. And Paul Rudd plays the supercilious, goody-two-shoes young Paris, a likely young fellow that the Capulets have earmarked as a suitable husband for Juliet, and as ever with Rudd roles from the 90s and 00s, his Dorian Gray youth is a continuing marvel.

Romeo meets Juliet and the lightning bolts of love and transgression strike at once – though perhaps not enough is said about how erotic they find the simple forbiddenness of their love. Here is where the young lovers’ two co-conspirators and enablers come in: the nurse, robustly played by Miriam Margolyes, who covers up the growing romance, and the cleric who is to marry them in secret and then devise a bizarre and reckless fake death scheme, compounded with irresponsibly incompetent letter-delivering by Father Laurence, played with visceral force by Pete Postlethwaite. When the final chorus talks about some being pardoned and some punished, this surely means leniency for the nurse but not Laurence – yet perhaps, considering the respect for patriarchy and the cloth, it could have been the other way around.

DiCaprio’s performance is excellent; his Romeo is transformed and astonished by the real thing; he has play-acted at love until now, and he hasn’t realised how vulnerable it would make him. Danes looks more mature than he does (though in fact six years younger) and she is such a smart, stylish player, even at this age. The Luhrmann R+J is a tonic and a delight.

• William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet is in UK cinemas from 27 March.