We all know Hamlet. Or, certainly, some part of Hamlet: snippets from the seven famous soliloquies, a brooding man holding a skull, Reviving Ophelia. It’s known. I thought I knew it, anyway, as a former theater student who, like many, has read and seen the play several times in various forms. (Does The Lion King count too?)

Honestly, though? I don’t know that I’d ever really gotten the play—its towering drama, the dizzying poetry of its language—before seeing director Sam Gold’s production at the Public Theater, starring Oscar Isaac. (It runs now through September 3.) Ominous and earthy (at times quite literally), Gold’s Hamlet has a simple, tactile charge, one that truly, in the least corny of senses, brings Shakespeare to life. The production is given extra, invaluable electricity by its star, whose crisply legible, fiercely intelligent performance confirms for me what I’ve long suspected: Oscar Isaac is the best dang actor of his generation.

Which, yes, I realize is a hacky, hyperbolic, and probably unnecessary claim to make. But he’s just so good in this play, as he’s been so good in so many things since his talents first caught our attention. He’s a classically trained actor of true range, one who can sing and dance, do comedy, action, and drama with equal ease and authority. He’s thrilling to watch, a prodigious mind sparking a nimble (and, yes, handsome) form into action. But he’s never showy; he doesn’t mug. Not in the wintry Coen brothers folk-music picaresque Inside Llewyn Davis, not in J.C. Chandor’s moody economic allegory A Most Violent Year, not in Paul Haggis’s shaggy civics mini-series Show Me a Hero, perhaps my favorite Isaac performance to date. Instead he inhabits, taking possession of a story’s world, and letting it take possession of him.

But that’s all been original stuff, roles he could make definitive by being the only actor who’s played them. But Hamlet is freaking Hamlet, as well-worn territory as there is in the Western dramatic canon. It takes a true thinking actor to not only mine something new out of Hamlet, but to actually clarify something about the melancholy Dane for a culture so steeped in his story. Watching Isaac delve into the role with his conversational yet lyrical delivery, one almost experiences the tale for the first time. Isaac finds the timeless, fraught humanity in a character who’s often played too carefully, too academically, as if he’s a term paper a young actor has to conquer to prove his mettle.

Over the play’s three-and-a-half hours, Isaac becomes more poet than player. His interpretation of Hamlet, as a decent guy who just can’t get past his grief, and is often thwarted by his own anger over that grief (he’s much like Lee in Manchester by the Sea, in that way), is sensitive and astute. He talks through each soliloquy as if these thoughts are genuinely, just then, blooming into being, not enshrined in literary tradition for centuries. Isaac’s organic nuance opens up the language, makes it almost contemporary. (Isaac seems to just speak Shakespeare naturally, like it’s a native tongue.) The graveyard scene—in which Hamlet regards poor Yorick and contemplates the fleetingness of all existence—is moving in a way I perhaps cynically didn’t think Shakespeare could be anymore. Same for the play’s final scene, which had members of my audience blubbery and sniffly with tears. At a Shakespeare play! In 2017! On a sunny Sunday afternoon in the summer!