Is the movie musical back? This week, there's reason to think it is.

But first: where did Hollywood musicals go? I have a theory. The reason the musical withered and all but died beginning in the mid-1960s is that baby boomers took control of pop culture. And from the get-go, musicals were off the boomers' cultural agenda.

For starters, shows like South Pacific and Oklahoma were the epitome of one's parents' taste -- nice, sentimental, middle-of-the-road -- and in 1970 that was toxic on the face of it.

The other reason baby boomers rejected the musical, I think, is that the Woodstock generation tends to be a weirdly literal-minded group. Enjoying a narrative form where people speak -- then suddenly sing or dance, and then continue speaking normally -- requires a suspension of disbelief evidently beyond the power of people who grew up in the 1960s, no matter how many psychotropic drugs they took in their youths.

Baby boomers' children, however, have spent the last decade or two secretly developing a taste for the genre. They've watched Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King over and over and over again. And they've watched MTV. Since every big song is now turned into a music video before it's released, and since every music video is essentially a three-and-a-half minute long clip from a hypothetical movie musical, every American born since 1970 has spent his or her youth unwittingly watching …musicals.

And so this core movie-going audience, people now in their teens and 20s, should be primed to see Moulin Rouge, which has just opened in theaters around the country.

Moulin Rouge was directed by Baz Luhrmann, and it is a splendid, luscious, unhinged, thrilling movie set in a fantastic belle époque Parisian netherworld. The director jokes about his hesitance to use "the M word" to describe the movie -- about how 20th Century Fox forbids him to call Moulin Rouge a musical.

The studio is worried that people like me, who've spent lifetimes faintly antagonistic toward musicals, will stay away. But Moulin Rouge is a musical. And one which, speaking for myself, engaged and entertained a straight man under 50 for two full hours.

Apart from the sheer cinematic energy and invention and sumptuousness, Luhrmann made two shrewd choices. First, he set Moulin Rouge in a cabaret dance hall, where it makes sense for characters to sing and dance at will. And he uses almost nothing but pop hits from the last 30 years…even though the story is set a hundred years ago, at the turn of the 20th century.

The result is a kind of cubism of time rather than of space. Music from 20 years ago? Music from 50 or 100 years ago? What's the difference? It's all music from the past.

The Moulin Rouge soundtrack is full of singers from the 1990's and the aughts performing tunes from the 1970's and 80's. Christina Aguilera, Lil Kim, Mya and Pink sing the 1973 Patti Labelle song Lady Marmalade, and Beck sings David Bowie's Diamond Dogs from 1974. And playing a self-made superstar courtesan of 1900, Nicole Kidman performs a medley of Marilyn Monroe's Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend and Madonna's Material Girl.

So first the baby boom generation rejects and abandons a theme. Now an artist from the trailing edge of that generation - Luhrmann was born in 1964 -- is responsible for the reinvention and rehabilitation of the movie musical. Is that ironic? Or inevitable?

This is Kurt Andersen, in Studio 360.