Set in 1950s Baltimore, this movie follows the adventures of Cry-Baby who, though he is sent to juvie, is determined to cross class (and taste) boundaries to get 'square' good-girl Allison back from a bad-boy with a heart of gold.
If Cry-Baby has a message, it's that Cry-Baby and Allison deserve each other because they're young and they're beautiful, which certainly runs counter to Waters' affection for the grotesque, the bad and the ugly.
The nostalgic delights in Waters's reform school drool are often more subtle than his other period offering, Hairspray, but it's still a polished debunking of pop culture from the "Pope of Trash".
I don't quite know how Waters did it (and I have absolutely no idea why he did it), but the fact that Cry-Baby is fun suggests that the filmmaker possesses an instinctive understanding of what made those Elvis pictures so successful in the first place.
It has a great score of obscure '50s rock and doo-wop. It has the candy-colored look of a '50s musical. What it doesn't have is a moment of anything that seems remotely real.
