For anyone who lived through the tabloid years of the aughts, Lindsay Lohan’s joyful return to the big screen isn’t just cause for celebration, it’s something that once seemed highly implausible. Lohan, the preeminent teen screen icon of the Y2K era, was subjected to a brutally judgmental media landscape in her young adulthood, which picked apart her partying, appearance, love life, erratic behavior, career choices and general mischief-making before she eventually slipped off the radar. In the past few years, she’s mounted a comeback via Netflix originals and a cameo in last year’s “Mean Girls” reboot, but seeing her star in a fun, fresh revival of one of her signature early 2000s hits feels nothing short of miraculous.

It’s also a miracle that “Freakier Friday” is as funny and entertaining as it is, because reboots and sequels bear a heavy burden of comparison to their beloved originals. Mark Waters’ 2003 film “Freaky Friday” (a remake of the 1976 film based on the book by Mary Rodgers) was a bona fide hit, and what’s clear — and crucial — in “Freakier Friday” is that writer Jordan Weiss and director Nisha Ganatra (Elyse Hollander has a story credit) have a true love and appreciation not just for the original film, but for Lohan’s filmography, and the entire subgenre of Disney Channel Original Movies. They throw the concept of a “guilty pleasure” to the wind and craft a comedy that’s giddily liberating in its celebration of every corny trope.

Somehow, “Freakier Friday” is self-aware but not sarcastic, knowing but not ironic, slapstick while remaining sincere, clever without being glib. It’s not a teardown or parody of the teen girly genre but a reaffirmation of it with a modern lens. It’s the kind of movie that an elder millennial mom and her Gen Alpha daughter can both enjoy on their own levels.

While “Freaky Friday” is a love letter to moms and daughters who learn to walk in each other’s shoes, “Freakier” is a sister story, and what it means to fold new family members in with the old. Our former teen rocker Anna (Lohan) is now a successful music manager in Los Angeles and a single mom to surfer girl Harper (Julia Butters). Her mother Tess (Jamie Lee Curtis), a therapist with a podcast, has assigned herself as grand-co-parent, and Anna chafes against her mother’s overbearing insertion of herself into her parenting.

That storyline quickly fades when Anna falls for another single parent, Eric (Manny Jacinto), who happens to be the father of Harper’s lab partner, Lily (Sophie Hammons). Too bad the girls can’t stand each other, and Lily wants to return to her native London while Harper can’t bear to be far from the beach. With Anna and Eric’s wedding looming (their courtship is depicted in a rapid-fire montage of snapshots and love notes), a peace accord must be forged. There’s only one thing that can resolve this battle of wills: body swap!

A visit with kooky psychic/spiritual grifter Madame Jen (Vanessa Bayer) leaves the teen girls with a mantra, “change the hearts that are wrong, and you will find where you belong.” A mysterious earthquake, a full moon, and boom: it’s a double swap. Mother and daughter Harper and Anna wake up in each other’s bodies, while Lily ends up in the body of her future step-grandmother Tess. Does that track? Not really. But if it gets Curtis into a bunch of wacky costumes, we’ll take it, and the excellent costume design by Natalie O’Brien does a lot of heavy lifting, story-wise.

Curtis is the hands-down superstar of “Freakier Friday.” While this may be Lohan’s big comeback, with the love story and the big climatic rock star moment, the movie belongs to Curtis. She gets the biggest material to play with, as the whiny fashionista teen princess Lily, and jumps at the opportunity to play the physical comedy to the max.

It’s nice to see Lohan having fun again, even if the spunk that made her a teen star feels slightly sanded down. Ganatra and Weiss throw a ton of high jinks, jokes, references and comedy heavy-hitters into the film so that it never slows down — even if it’s stuffed to bursting with bits. Almost every supporting actor from the original is back, and “Freakier Friday” manages to hit a sweet spot of nostalgia without being an outright period piece.

It’s easy to question the necessity of reboots and legasequels in this IP-obsessed movie landscape. But “Freakier Friday” feels genuinely restorative, not just for Lohan’s reputation, but for the inner child who once loved movies like this, delighting in silly tropes like food fights, hunks tossing their hair in slow-motion and makeover montages. Ganatra has delivered us a love letter to that movie, and it’s a true joy to revel in that playground once again.

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‘FREAKIER FRIDAY’

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG (for thematic elements, rude humor, language and some suggestive references)

Running time: 1:51

How to watch: In theaters Aug. 8

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