Cheyenne Jackson is what happens when you cross a middle linebacker and a Broadway chorus boy: He sings, he cracks jokes, and I bet he could bring down a fullback in the open field. Near the start of “All Shook Up,” the new jukebox musical based on the songs of Elvis Presley, he alights from his motorcycle, all black leather, bulk, and sideburns. Normally when a man like this complains that his hot rod is making “a jiggly-wiggly noise,” and the only grease monkey in sight is a sexy brunette, the story is not going anyplace suitable for the entire family. This is only the first of many surprises, pleasant and unpleasant, awaiting audiences at the Palace, where the show opened last night.

The appeal of “All Shook Up” is tidal – maddeningly so. For all the junk floating on its surface, like bad jokes and shallow characters, and all the other junk sloshing around your ankles, like horrible cliches and even more bad jokes, it keeps tugging you in appealing directions: now smart, now mildly subversive. Here and there it transcends its genre. That’s not saying much, you’ll argue (rightly). To say a show has more going for it than such jukebox musicals as the Beach Boys derived “Good Vibrations” or the Burt Bacharach inspired revue “The Look of Love” is like calling someone a more trustworthy babysitter than Michael Jackson.

Almost every one of the show’s virtues bears an accompanying complaint. From top to bottom, “All Shook Up” boasts one of the most talented musical casts on Broadway. There are no stars here except the ones this show will create, particularly Mr. Jackson, making a marvelous leading-man debut, and leading lady Jenn Gambatese, who confirms she’s one of the brightest young talents in town. Yet they and their gifted cast mates are stuck with some thankless jobs, like inhabiting nonexistent characters and selling plot twists that are absurd even by jukebox standards.

Music supervisor/arranger Stephen Oremus makes many of the show’s two dozen Elvis songs suit a Broadway stage more naturally than you’d think possible. However, too many of them devolve into noisy, raise-the-dead belting. The end of the otherwise excellent “Can’t Help Falling in Love” sounds as if it’s sung by a horde of Valkyries. The show offers further proof that on today’s Broadway, it’s always 11 o’clock, always time for a big blowout number.

Librettist Joe DiPietro (the author of “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change”) will be chided for borrowing from everywhere: “Hairspray,” “The Music Man” (or is it “Orpheus Descending”?), and multiple corners of the Shakespeare canon. But I admire the show’s larceny. If you’re going to steal, why not steal from “Twelfth Night”? Some will dismiss the whole enterprise as lower middlebrow, but hey, it’s Broadway.

In weighing all these exciting achievements and dispiriting screw-up, the decisive factor is Christopher Ashley. Whatever flaws the show might suffer, it has been directed. It has shape, focus, pace; David Rockwell’s design and Ken Roberson’s choreography are apt and well integrated; the performances are universally strong. Mr. Ashley is masterful here. With material like this, he needs to be.

In “the middle of a square state in the middle of a square decade,” Natalie (Ms. Gambatese) fixes people’s cars, and dreams of boys. But she does not dream of Dennis (Mark Price), the dweeby boy who’s afraid to admit his love to her. Dad (Jonathan Hadary) is sad, and a widower. He visits the record store run by Motormouth Maybelle – sorry, I got my wise, straight-talking, amply proportioned black proprietresses crossed up – the bar run by Sylvia (Sharon Wilkins), and they swap woes. So many woes, that suddenly 20 people are belting “Heartbreak Hotel,” a version that fails to muster a fraction of the energy or soul achieved by a white boy from Memphis 50 years ago.

Ms. Gambatese has the goods to be a major talent – a knack for comedy, a gorgeous voice, the looks to match – but early on, the show has the makings of a long, long night. Finally, Chad (Mr. Jackson) arrives, with his guitar and his incredibly illicit-sounding automotive complaint. In a Broadway woefully short on leading men, Mr. Jackson may be a real find. Natalie goes chasing after him, but he’s chasing after Miss Sandra (Leah Hocking), the curvy blond who runs the museum. Don’t ask.

Faster than you can say “Send Shaiman and Wittman a check,” another tortured relationship springs up, an interracial one. Sylvia’s daughter Lorraine (terrific Nikki M. James) falls for Dean (equally terrific Curtis Holbrook), the white son of the town’s uptight mayor (Alix Korey). The mayor, busy instituting a kind of red-state shariah law, is followed everywhere by her mute sidekick, Sheriff Earl (John Jellison).

How many towering icons of Western culture does it take to kick start a Broadway musical these days? On the evidence presented here: two. The fun only begins when Natalie pretends to be a man, Ed, to get close to Chad. As in “Twelfth Night,” cross-dressing romantic chaos ensues. Soon everybody finds their way to the abandoned amusement park on the edge of town, much as Rosalind and the others retreat to the Forest of Arden in “As You Like It.” Mr. Rockwell gives the broken-down roller coasters a rusty grandeur. Credit him and Mr. Ashley for the moment when the characters’ cumulative libido makes the whole place flicker to life.

Plot spoilers lie ahead, so if you value your narrative innocence, look away. Borrowing another twist from Rosalind and Orlando, Natalie/Ed convinces Chad to kiss her/him, and Chad digs it – the him part. “Good Vibrations” tried a similar twist, but was cheap and slapdash where Mr. Ashley allows this one to breathe. Plus, the stakes are higher here: The man who could not show his pelvis becomes a champion of the love that dare not speak its name.

This struck me as exceptionally funny. Maybe to grasp the full comic potential, you need to see it, as I did, on a Saturday afternoon, with herds of tourists. You can feel the room do a collective double take, particularly at what comes next. Lorraine and Dean return to sing “The Power of My Love,” accompanied by the monumentally confused Chad. The three of them turn this late Elvis favorite into an anthem of racial and sexual liberation. The song ends with an improbably outré tableau, considering the context: a flock of men in black leather jackets, platinum wigs, aviator sunglasses, and spangly angel wings descend from the sky, straddling motorcycles.

No one will confuse this number with refighting Stonewall. Still, judged against the banal standards of Broadway today, glittery biker angels singing Elvis songs is a clever bit of pop subversion. Even as you regret all the shallow, derivative, and corny things in the show, you have to admire the devious minds that dreamed up such a gesture and made it seem hardly gratuitous at all. That, and the good taste that spares us “In the Ghetto.”

(1564 Broadway, 212-307-4100).