“Do you hear the people sing?”

Let me admit something right up top here: I have never seen Les Misérables before, in any format. I mention this first because it might frame your own opinion of my review; I won’t blame you.

Yes, it’s been around for awhile, but I have yet to partake in any of it. Not the 1862 French novel by Victor Hugo. Not any of the popular stage renderings, from Broadway all the way down to the community theater level. Not any of the numerous television and film adaptations. Not even the soundtrack, which I’m learning now is quite popular. For whatever reason, Les Misérables just never entered my life.

Now it has. And so Les Misérables gains another fan.

I’ll have to admit, though, that I struggled with this film. It was the singing dialogue. Not the songs; I liked those. Just the random bits of singing meant to be heard as a conversation. I know that’s a style musical fans enjoy, but it’s odd. Just speak already! Plain spoken English would make pieces of dialogue like “You’re under arrest,” so much easier to convey without sounding melodramatic and bizarre. If you recall, this was my big argument about The Phantom of the Opera from a couple years back, when Gerard Butler would get all sing-songy about metal Tupperware: Look at my cup / I have a cup / How did this cup get here in my hand?

In any case, speech-song stuff aside, Les Misérables is a gorgeous and cinematic movie. This isn’t Chicago, with minimal sets designed to look like a Broadway stage. No, this is a full-blown epic, with lots of location footage atop snow-dusted peaks, in vaulted European chapels and in fully realized outdoor sets with giant concrete elephants and armies and rebellions. It’s all so staggeringly large and eye-popping that it’s a wonder the actors can keep up with the set designers, but they do. The first scene really sets the stage: hundreds of prisoners pull a wounded warship into a dry dock. And down in the crowd is Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) heaving a rope and singing away like true jailbird.

Valjean, I’m told is one of the great stage characters, because he’s so conflicted and three-dimensional. Jackman plays him like it might be his last role, with every ounce of energy and with complete and utter confidence. Jackman excels at almost everything he touches, but he really outdoes himself here. Valjean is released from prison in 19th-Century France, and he immediately skips probation. On his trail is Un Chien le Bounty Hunter … I mean, Javert (Russell Crowe), a misguidedly noble officer for the government. These two play cat and mouse for the whole movie, including in a pivotal break in action during a revolution, when Valjean saves his life, thereby ruffling the frilly shirts in Javert’s military footlocker. Kindness, it seems, has eternally stumped him.

Valjean’s adopted daughter, Cosette (Amanda Seyfried), also figures in here, as does her tortured mother, Fantine (Anne Hathaway), who turned to a very dark place to make sure Cosette had the opportunities she deserved. Hathaway, weeping and broken, sings the famous “I Dreamed a Dream.” It’s a heartbreaking scene, and one of the film’s finest moments.

Almost all of the songs are wonderfully staged and sung. Hathaway is brilliant and hard to top, but the rest of the cast gets mighty close on “Do You Hear the People Sing?” and in an ambitious cross-cutting editing exercise in “One More Day,” as the cast ponders their placement in the story as an intermission approaches. Jackman’s singing performances are especially striking. He grows confused, sad, angry, frustrated, triumphant … seemingly the whole gamut of emotions during his internal argument with himself in “Who Am I?” (Pssst, you’re Jean Valjean.) And because the musical themes carry over through various parts of the film, it all blends together quite nicely, even when Crowe, the weakest singer in the cast, sing-talks his lines.

Another noteworthy performance is by Sacha Baron Cohen as a pimp, pickpocket and hustler in the fantastic “Master of the House,” in which he describes how to plunder his guests' wallets: Charge’em for the lice / extra for the mice / two percent for looking in the mirror twice. In the scene he holds up a menu for his brothel — “Look, touch, do.” — that might be simplicity at its least elegant. We laugh at Borat and Brüno, but Cohen is really quite talented at many other things.

I thoroughly enjoyed Les Misérables, much more than I ever thought possible. And here it is days after seeing the movie, and I’m still humming those damn songs. It must’ve worked.