The novel Crazy Rich Asians feels hydroponically grown to be a major Hollywood blockbuster. Large sections of Kevin Kwan’s book are dedicated to dreamlike descriptions of luxury consumption, brand names catalogued in an unstable mixture of reverence and snark. It was born a textual matrix for set designers, couturiers, and cinematographers: gleaming interiors, supercars, earrings with six-figure price tags. The rest is a whirlwind of claws-bared, reality-TV melodrama, surrounding a sweetly ingenuous romance plot that touches the deep chords of all your evolved instincts.

The catch is in the title: it is a book populated entirely by Asians. True, these are not the earnest, striving immigrants whose pedestrian virtues many pay lip service to while politely disdaining. (I’ll never forget the gently bemused charity with which people regarded me when I told them I was at work on a book about Asian-Americans. “What do you plan to say about that?” they’d ask.) These are the overseas Chinese merchant families who attained oligarchical wealth throughout Southeast Asia and in Singapore, where Crazy Rich Asians is set, speaking British English and living as royalty amid tropical splendor. Into this milieu walks a 29-year-old Asian-American ingénue, an econ professor at N.Y.U., who learns, following a first-class flight to Singapore, that her history-professor boyfriend is an heir to one of Asia’s largest fortunes. She will meet her prospective mother-in-law, whose steely hauteur and distaste toward her son’s would-be fiancée will not succumb to the blandishments of American-style happy endings. Eleanor Young is sure that Rachel Chu will not devote herself to the maintenance of the family’s dynastic power, rather than pursue her own individual happiness (teaching game theory to undergrads) in the manner of Americans. She is probably not wrong. Drama ensues.

The last major Hollywood film to star a large ensemble cast of Asians, The Joy Luck Club (that heart-rending and mortifying memorial to the terror our immigrant mothers endured), released in 1993, aroused a fleeting hope that Asians would step into the sunlight of wider media visibility—one that was summarily dashed. In September of 2017, Michael Lewis, the author of the nonfiction best-seller Flash Boys (2014), whose film rights sold the year it was published, said that plans for the movie had stalled. “There were e-mails back and forth about how impossible it was to make a movie with an Asian lead. The problem was Brad Katsuyama,” Lewis explained, referring to the former stock trader at the center of the story. “They don’t think there’s a well enough known Asian male actor. Which I think is crazy.”

The chicken-or-egg problem applies: how do you get a well-known Asian actor if you don’t ever cast Asians in leading roles, which you are constrained from doing because none are well enough known? But the economics of Hollywood are changing. There is now an eye toward an ever wealthier Chinese consumer market that will soon enough dwarf our own. Back home in the U.S., the politics of diversity has made blockbusters of films that pivoted to non-white stars.

The confluence of events summoned forth a full-blown matinee idol. Henry Golding, half-English, half-Malaysian, but playing a Chinese Singaporean, emerges as a classic leading man in his first film role following a career as a television host. Golding is smoothly affable, devoid of any underlying turbulence. He lights up the screen, as if being a movie star was the most natural thing in the world for him, and as if we have always had—and always will have—Asian leading men. Will we? In May, it was reported that Netflix had acquired the rights to Flash Boys. Golding himself is slated to appear as Blake Lively’s husband in the September thriller A Simple Favor.

Alongside Golding is a sizable cross-section of all the actors of East Asian descent working in Hollywood today. Michelle Yeoh as Eleanor Young is an iron matriarch—but not a cartoon Dragon Lady. Awkwafina plays Rachel’s endearingly quirky best friend, Peik Lin. The supporting cast, including Gemma Chan, Sonoya Mizuno, and Chris Pang, embody the beauty obsession that has overtaken Asia’s rich. Ken Jeong and Jimmy O. Yang play comic factotums, perhaps brought on to remind the audience that all Asians aren’t impossibly glamorous, chiseled, and ripped.

Here’s what one felt watching Constance Wu as Rachel Chu and Henry Golding as Nicholas Young. Bated breath. A lifetime of psychosexual angst quickening and tightening. Would they carry it off? Wu made her name playing a Taiwanese immigrant mother in the ABC comedy Fresh off the Boat, the first prime-time network show featuring an Asian-American family in more than 20 years. Here she is an ingénue in a princess fantasy—a starring role in the central story our culture tells itself about love between a man and a woman. Would they be relatable, funny, sexy, smart, cool? Would they cause the decades-long sense of erasure and subtle denigration Asians have long associated with cinema (preferring to see no Asians at all to the too-often mortifying portrayals) to evanesce? The odds against any of these things happening was enormous. That all of them did can be described as an enormous stroke of fortune. After an advance screening in New York, many otherwise jaded and snarky social-media personages were not too defended to admit to the world: “I cried just seeing Asians on the screen.”

For interviews with the cast of Crazy Rich Asians, check out our exclusive here.

Hair by Robert Vetica; Makeup and grooming by Mai Quynh; Manicures by Debbie Leavitt; Set Design by Thomas Thurnauer; Produced on location by Westy Productions. For details, go to VF.com/credits.