This has been a movie before, in 1971, when it was directed by William Friedkin. In his hands, it was as horrifying as his most famous work The Exorcist, but in a different way. The script is a pile-up of gay self-loathing, which in the right hands can be one of our most revealing pieces about gay male existence.

In the wrong hands, however, it becomes a collection of ugly stereotypes, with each member of the party a faintly homophobic stock character—the promiscuous Larry (played in the Netflix version Andrew Rannells), the Warhol-like aesthete vampire (Zachary Quinto), the dumb beefcake (Charlie Carver), the campy queen (Robin de Jesus) the closet case (Brian Hutchison) and the self-loathing man who wishes he was not gay (Jim Parsons).

Luckily, the new The Boys in the Band seems to be in the right hands. Whereas other versions of the play and the film suffer from having straight actors in some of the roles “playing gay” with varying degrees of authenticity, Netflix’s version has an all-gay cast, with the actors above also joined by Tuc Watkins, Matt Bomer and Michael Benjamin Washington, with direction via gay director Joe Mantello.

Before making this film version, the entire cast appeared in a Tony award-winning version of the play, and the months together have a huge impact on the movie for better or worse (and mostly for the better).

At its best, the film has a tension that is like a car crash simultaneously happening quickly and slowly, with the cast nailing a rat-a-tat dialogue style that can only be perfected after months of working together while also allowing the pressure to build as the party guests start playing a twisted game where they have to call the one person they love. At its worst, however, this can make the film seem too stagey, like it has only partly left Broadway behind.

The Boys in the Band has always held a controversial place in the gay movie canon, with some having problems with the sheer amount of gay self-loathing in the work, especially when delivered by a straight director and some straight cast members.

Those people, however, should feel free to replace the Friedkin version in the canon with this Netflix one. Having all the actors being gay feels revolutionary—even certified gay theater classics like Rent, Angels in America and TV like Will and Grace and Queer As Folk had majority straight casts.

The all-gay cast adds an element that all of these lack. Clearly, all these actors know people exactly like the ones they are playing, which gives even the most stereotypical of the stock types depth and meaning.

Mantello also deserves credit for adding some extra scenes the previous movie version lacks that help to frame the story better. For one, he manages to make the party seem like actual fun at the start before it turns sour, whereas in the Friedkin the party feels doomed from the start.

The new version also follows our party-goers after the horrors of the night end, serving to humanize them, and showing that what we have just seen was a bad night for the group, rather than a typical night. This is left more ambiguous in the original version, and that does not help the criticism that the movie only shows gay people at their most broken.

Of course, it helps that the original film was a contemporary production, while the new one is a period piece, set in the same American mid-century limbo time that Murphy’s Ratched and Hollywood appear to be set in. This means that we can enjoy the movie as a period piece, from a time where gay men would trade lines from Judy Garland songs and the movie Sunset Blvd.

It also means we now have distance from the events portrayed and enjoy just how funny the script is—until it’s not. If you think the queens of RuPaul’s Drag Race cut to the bone in the “reading is fundamental” challenge, just wait until you see these guys throw shade.

Some may still think that the film relies too much on tropes of internalized homophobia, and they are more than welcome to click off The Boys in the Band and on to Murphy’s Hollywood, his outlandish fantasy of gay men being accepted in 1940s Tinseltown. They will, however, miss out on the much better work, which by far is Murphy’s best work on Netflix.

The Boys in the Band is streaming on Netflix from September 30.