It may be that on its surface, “Little Women” doesn’t seem as fresh and progressive, comparatively. Maybe men feel it’s too familiar — the book has been turned into a movie no fewer than seven times, including a little-seen version released just last year. But in an era when sequels and remakes clog the film landscape (many of them male-centered), it’s hardly an exception.

Or perhaps the movie’s marketing undersold just how inventive Ms. Gerwig’s adaptation — which takes many interesting creative liberties, such as ditching the linear narrative — is. The bucolic imagery in the trailer underlines the cozy, even slightly sappy aspects of Ms. Alcott’s book: the March sisters with their flowing locks and billowing gowns, looking as though they just stepped out of a John Singer Sargent painting. Knitting around a fire. Lots of dialogue centered around whom the young women will marry (in England, the second half of the book was called “Good Wives”). Some may feel the story is solely about getting a husband.

But the book has always been about more than this; in the character of Jo March (played in this iteration by Ms. Ronan), Ms. Alcott created a rebellious, tomboyish heroine eager for adventure. “I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy,” Jo declares in Chapter One. “And it’s worse than ever now, for I’m dying to go and fight with Papa. And I can only stay home and knit, like a poky old woman!” From afar “Little Women” may look like a standard 19th-century romance, but Jo is ready to subvert conventions from the start.

Ms. Gerwig’s film inhabits this spirit throughout. As in the book, the March sisters are intellectually curious, avid readers and artistically inclined, eagerly performing Jo’s melodramatic plays. Amy eventually goes to Europe to pursue a career in art, Beth excels at piano, Meg shows talent as a performer. In a pivotal scene late into the movie, Jo tries to describe to her mother what writing means to her and why she isn’t defined by wifely feelings. Women, she says, “have minds and they have souls as well as just hearts.”

There’s reason to believe this new “Little Women” has appeal beyond a predominantly female audience. Several male film critics have given enthusiastic reviews, and on Wednesday Ms. Maslin tweeted her belief that male opposition has receded now that the movie is out. “Men are loving it,” she wrote. “Even ones who said they wouldn’t go.”

Yet that this concern even existed to begin with is disheartening. If many men haven’t wanted to give it a chance because they don’t think it’s meant for them, we still have a way to go in considering all kinds of narratives about women to be deserving of thoughtful attention.

We can turn to a much-canonized American male writer, David Foster Wallace, for a vivid phrase not far off from Jo’s cry to her mother: Fiction writing “is what it is to be a [expletive] human being.” That’s what “Little Women” is — a plea for women to be seen as human beings.

Kristy Eldredge (@TheMiddleMoffat) is a writer based in Brooklyn. She has a humor blog, The Laffs Institute.