R omeo + Juliet is not the most renowned or beloved of Shakespeare’s plays, but it is perhaps the most foundational. The 16th-century tragedy, a story of love-addled teenagers and white-hot resentment, is often an English student’s first introduction to the bard’s oeuvre – more accessible and relatable to teens, with its plaintive lust and histrionic mood swings, than the more austere machinations in, say, Macbeth, Hamlet or Othello. And if Romeo + Juliet is the young person’s entry to Elizabethan English, perhaps no version of it is more worthy of the term “gateway drug” than Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film version, which reimagined Verona’s family feud as a tropical gang war and launched an army of teenage crushes with the faces of Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes.

The maximalist interpretation of Shakespeare’s most lovelorn work, released 30 years ago this week (!), retains Elizabethan verse but announces its divergence from rigid classicism from the jump.…