NEW YORK, NY.- For many young misfits and wannabes, “The Outsiders,” published in 1967, is still a sacred text. Written by an actual teenager — S.E. Hinton drafted it in high school — it spoke with eyewitness authority to teenage alienation. Even if its poor “greasers” and rich “socs” (the book’s shorthand for society types) now seem like exhibits in a midcentury angst museum, their inchoate yearning has not aged, nor has Hinton’s faith that there is poetry in every soul.

These tender qualities argue against stage adaptation, as does Francis Ford Coppola’s choppy, murky 1983 movie. (It introduced a lot of young stars, but it’s a mess.) The material doesn’t want sophisticated adults mucking about in it or, worse, gentling its hard edges for commercial consumption. Harshness tempered with naivete is central to its style and argument. To turn the novel into a Broadway musical, with the gloss of song and dance that entails, would thus seem a category error worse even than the film’s.

And yet the musical version of “The Outsiders” that opened Thursday has been made with so much love and sincerity that it survives with most of its heart intact. Youth is key to that survival; the cast, if not actually teenage — their singing is way too professional for that — is still credibly fresh-faced. (Five of the nine principals are making their Broadway debuts.) That there is no cynical distance between them and their characters is in itself refreshing to see.

Also key to the show’s power is director Danya Taymor’s rivetingly sensorial approach to the storytelling, even if it sometimes comes at a cost to the story itself. Many stunning things are happening on the stage of the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater — and from the sobs I heard the other night, in the audience, too.

Some of those sobs came from teenagers, who can’t have seen in recent musicals many serious attempts at capturing the confusions of youth. Although witches, princesses and leaping newsboys can be entertaining, their tales are escapes from reality, not portraits of it. From the start, “The Outsiders” is gritty — literally. (The stage is covered with synthetic rubber granules that kick up with each fight and footfall.) There is no sugarcoating the facts as Hinton found them: Her Tulsa, Oklahoma, is an apartheid town, the greasers subject to brutal violence if they dare step into the socs’ territory or, worse, lay eyes on their girls.

But the unavoidable cross-clan romance — between 14-year-old greaser Ponyboy Curtis (Brody Grant) and soc Cherry Valance (Emma Pittman) — is something of a MacGuffin here. The score, by Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance of the folk duo Jamestown Revival, working with Justin Levine, gives them just two songs, neither really about love.

The musical is more interested in the greasers themselves, in various permutations. There’s the fraternal romance of the full gang, as in “West Side Story”; the lyrics of their establishing number, “Grease Got a Hold,” will sound familiar. (“Play it cool, little brother, and you’ll have it made.”) There’s the veneration of their scary alpha, Dallas (Joshua Boone). And there’s the literal brotherhood of the Curtis boys. The oldest, Darrel (Brent Comer), has sacrificed his hopes of escape to care for Ponyboy and Sodapop (Jason Schmidt) after the death of their parents in a car crash.

The central relationship, though, is between Ponyboy and Johnny Cade (Sky Lakota-Lynch), a 16-year-old already bearing a life’s worth of sorrow. It is they who meet the soc girls at the drive-in, who get attacked by the girls’ letter-jacketed menfolk, who go on the lam after an act of self-defense and draw spiritually closer (there are no homoerotics) in the tragedy that ensues.

I’m glad to say the musical doesn’t stint on that tragedy; the book by playwright Adam Rapp (with an assist from Levine) goes everywhere the novel does. A rumble, a murder, a suicide and a fire are just some of the stops on its trail of tears.

But depicting all these big events while also making room for a full slate of songs has required some compromises in a show that — I can’t believe I’m saying this — may be too short at 2 hours, 25 minutes. The novel’s first-person point-of-view, retained here as direct-to-audience narration by Ponyboy, feels like a too-expedient trade-off, drawing us out of the immediate action into some implied future. Even so, in the second act especially, incidents butt up against one another with insufficient connective tissue; it’s bone against bone.

The songs are squeezed, too — a shame because many are lovely. Johnstown Revival has just the right sound for the material, blending guitar-based folk and foursquare period rock into classic balladry for emotional high points. (They really come through with “Stay Gold,” a gorgeous 11 o’clock yearner for Johnny and Ponyboy.) But as is common for theatrical newcomers, their style doesn’t offer the ear or the drama enough variety, and the lyrics are too generic and gangly to further character development.

If the impact of the songs is intermittent, the design and flow of “The Outsiders” are endlessly effective. Although this is the first musical Taymor has directed, she brings with her from plays such as “Pass Over” and “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” a gift for complexities of pain and varieties of darkness.

Befitting the milieu, the set, by design collective AMP and Tatiana Kahvegian, is modest: a tractor tire, a junker car, a bunch of wooden boards. But it reconfigures itself as fast as the characters’ febrile emotions, the tire becoming a fountain, the car a bed, the boards a bier.

Beyond that, it’s hard to separate the design disciplines here, especially in the devastating, rain-soaked climactic rumble, which, though aestheticized, remains brutal with its time-lapse mayhem. Staged by choreographers Rick and Jeff Kuperman, its effectiveness is as much a matter of the lighting by Brian MacDevitt, projections by Hana S. Kim, costumes by Sarafina Bush, and special effects by Jeremy Chernick and Lillis Meeh. As for sound, it’s hard to describe the astonishments that Cody Spencer puts in our ears: what a child hears when his parents brawl, what it sounds like inside a concussion, how a car roars in memory.

Given its subject, point-of-view, author and even its title, “The Outsiders” should not benefit so much from the expertise of insiders. To the extent it succeeds anyway, it’s because it offers faithful service to a story that is sometimes almost embarrassingly sincere. How many musicals unblushingly quote Robert Frost? (“Stay Gold,” a reference to one of the novel’s most famous lines, is drawn from Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”) How many make a song of Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations” and, in doing so, create them?

It’s a strange paradox of Broadway that its bigness, when used humbly, can honor quite delicate ideas. Whether it can sustain them is another story. In “The Outsiders,” they are not sustained; the structural problems mean its achievements don’t stick. But they’re still achievements, and a show need not be for the ages to be for the moment. In that sense, it’s fair, citing Frost, to call it golden — nature’s “hardest hue to hold.”

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‘The Outsiders’At the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, Manhattan; outsidersmusical.com. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.