Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” is lurid, shallow, glamorous, trashy, tasteless, seductive, sentimental, aloof, and artificial. It’s an excellent adaptation, in other words, of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s melodramatic American classic. Luhrmann, as expected, has turned “Gatsby” into a theme-park ride. But he’s done it in exactly the right way. He hasn’t tried to make the novel more respectable, intellectual, or realistic. Instead, he’s taken “The Great Gatsby” very seriously just as it is.

“Gatsby” is hard to pin down. On the one hand, it’s broadly understood as a classic American novel, which suggests that it must have important things to say about the twenties, money, love, and the American dream. On the other, it seems self-evidently to be about style over substance. It’s short (only a hundred and fifty pages); its plot is absurd; and it examines only the thinnest wedge of American life. It was poorly received when it was published (H. L. Mencken thought it was “no more than a glorified anecdote”), and it continues to be an object of skepticism (Kathryn Schulz, in last week’s New York, writes that “Gatsby” is “aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent”). In 1950, in “The Liberal Imagination,” Lionel Trilling predicted that Gatsby’s story would lose its magnetism: Gatsby, Trilling wrote, represented the fantasy of “personal ambition and heroism, of life committed to, or thrown away for, some ideal of self,” while modern society urges young people to find “distinction through cooperation, subordination, and an expressed piety of social usefulness.” (“The Great Zuckerberg” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.) And yet, all the while, “Gatsby” has grown more beloved and resonant. Today the novel, like Gatsby himself, seems suspicious.

A lot of the confusion stems from the fact that “Gatsby” isn’t like other great American books. It’s not a social novel, like “Sister Carrie,” or a novel of manners, like “The House of Mirth,” or a novel about our national destiny, like “American Pastoral.” “Gatsby” is weirder than all those books; it’s more like Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio.” It’s about a spiritual atmosphere, and about the inner life that gives rise to that atmosphere. It’s popular because we still live in that atmosphere today. Fitzgerald’s novel is cool, sexy, stylized, and abstract; there’s a dreamlike falseness, a hollowness, an unreality to it, and that apparent superficiality is part of what makes it fascinating. It’s modernist and European without being arty. The best moments in the novel have the devious, carnal sophistication of high fashion; the characters seem unreal, but are also unforgettable. And, for all its strangeness, it also possesses a glamorous, crowd-pleasing commercialism.

What’s most appealing about “Gatsby” might be its mood of witty hopelessness, of vivacious self-destructiveness. When Daisy says, of her daughter, “I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool,” you can’t help but be drawn in. Perhaps she’s right: look around, and you can easily see the advantages of being rich, attractive, and ignorant. Even if she isn’t right, Daisy’s attitude strikes a chord. This atmosphere of casual, defiant, disillusioned cool is the novel’s unique contribution to literature. It’s the reason the novel’s endured. And it’s to this side of the novel that Luhrmann is attracted: the seductive side.

Fitzgerald understood the pleasures of giving in, and he saw people as desperate to give in to nearly anything—a drink, a person, a story, a feeling, a song, a crowd, an idea. We were especially willing, he thought, to give in to ideas—to fantasies. “Gatsby” captures, with great vividness, the push and pull of illusion and self-delusion; the danger and thrill of forgetting, lying, and fantasizing; the hazards and the indispensability of dreaming and idealization. We often declare our independence, Fitzgerald thought, by declaring our allegiance to a cause that makes what Trilling called a “large, strict, personal demand upon life.” Everyone is always getting carried away in “Gatsby” (not least its narrator, Nick Carraway). They get swept up in big parties. They don’t want to drink, but once the whiskey bottle is produced, they drink too much. They’re led into back rooms where they meet gangsters. They become involved in love triangles. They accept the generosity of bad people; they borrow cars and drive too fast; they adopt mannerisms, and believe in principles which, last week, they didn’t know existed. Everybody is getting carried away—but always in their own way. Daisy, when she sings along, sings “in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again.” Reading “Gatsby,” you think: What could be more pleasurable? You meet someone at a party, and you find that their attitudes exert a force on yours. You become a little more like them, and, also, a little more yourself. It’s a little like the way you fall in love with a pop song. You give in to the same song as everyone else, but in the most private, personal way.

In “The Great Gatsby,” there are a few large ideas, a few common dreams, to which everybody is attracted. Gatsby’s romantic fantasy, his love story, exerts the most force in the novel. Gatsby’s organized his life around one big idea: that love, at its best, is permanent and impersonal. This is his dream, his song. A love affair seems like something that happens between two people at a particular time and place, but, Gatsby hopes, if their love is strong enough, it becomes a law of nature, a rule of fate that can’t be changed by circumstance or even by choice. It’s a familiar wish—we all want to be loved perfectly and forever—and it makes for a great story; there’s something admirable in it, and, along with Nick, you wonder whether a Great Romance might complete your life. (“Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan,” Nick says, “I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs, and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening her in my arms.”)

But “Gatsby” isn’t really a novel about love. It’s more interested in the act of fantasizing than in any particular fantasy. Much of “The Great Gatsby” is spent watching as many dreams and fantasies as possible, including Gatsby’s, rise and fall like the tides. There’s the compelling dream of youth, with its parties, songs, and dances, with its sexuality, beauty, and athleticism. There’s Nick’s dream of the old America: the place to which you go home for the holidays, “my Middle West . . . where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name.” There’s the vague dream of art (represented, dismally, by the photographer Mr. McKee, and by Gatsby’s shirts, and by jazz). And on the margins are the dreams of intellectual life, business success, and family happiness. Gatsby is magnetic in part because he accepts everyone, no matter what it is they idealize: with a smile, Nick says, Gatsby “understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that he had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.” Only later do we realize that Gatsby is so open-minded because he is the ultimate dreamer and pretender.