Yes, Stranger Things is nostalgic. But it's also just a really good show.

Maybe Stranger Things could be named for its crazy DNA. A mix of ET and The X Files, of Stand by Me and Under the Skin, and The Twilight Zone and Twin Peaks, the show isn't exactly hard to describe; the trouble is that the descriptions sound insane. Imagine The Thing as written by John Hughes, or The Goonies directed by Ridley Scott with a strong assist from Reality Bites.

Stranger Things is weird, it's hyper-referential, and — for a touching coming-of-age story that's also a conspiracy thriller, a paranormal horror movie, and a nostalgic love letter to '80s cinema — it's really, really good.

The show — which dropped on Netflix July 15 — kicks off with the spooky cold greys and greens of a government lab in the early '80s, where a terrified tech meets an unpleasant end. Then — because horror is a function of its contrast with normalcy — we're ushered into the comforting yellow-orange clutter of a typical '80s suburban home as four boys debate the merits of a fireball vs. a protection spell toward the end of a 10-hour Dungeons and Dragons campaign. This home is in Hawkins, Indiana, a slightly depressed small town near a quarry that's also home to a sad lantern-jawed police chief, Winona Ryder as Unglamorous Single Mom, her misfit teenaged son, a nerdy girl, the jock she's dating, her Plain Jane BFF Barb, two middle-school bullies, a clueless dad, and a hellmouth.

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This giant, multi-genre apparatus creaks into gear when one of the four Dungeons and Dragons players, a sweet boy named Will Byers, goes missing. Stranger Things organizes itself fairly quickly into clusters of characters who approach that central mystery in different ways — maybe even in different genres. Ryder — as nostalgic a casting choice as you're likely to get these days — actually plays completely against the type she makes us nostalgic for. No poise, no disaffected posturing here: Ryder is Joyce Byers, panicked mother (and if I have a major criticism of this show, it's that I wish her character had been granted a few other emotional notes).

Normalcy doesn't last long in Stranger Things; domesticity quickly devolves into an uncanny mirror, and the suburban home in particular becomes a thing that can flip into its inverse. Joyce, for instance, tries to communicate with Will in some unorthodox but creepily cinematic ways, one of which involves turning her home into a demented Christmas Ouija board.

Not to be outdone, Will's friends Mike, Lucas, and Dustin also set about investigating his disappearance. Caught in a mixtape of E.T. and The Goonies, they're helped by a hunted-looking girl their age whose shaved head, stilted speech, Matilda-like powers, and identifying tattoo — "011" — suggest she's escaped from some major Cold War experiment. They hide her in Mike's house. Scenes of the girl (played by the phenomenal Millie Bobby Brown) — who answers to "Eleven" or "El" for short — exploring the house when no one is home, a tiny traumatized ghost at the feast, are unexpectedly affecting.

Then there's the high school investigative team, which includes Will's older brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), a dropout with a gift for photographing the suburban home's secrets from the outside, Steve, a wealthy jock (Joe Keery's resemblance to Sean Penn in his Spicoli days made me think of Fast Times at Ridgemont High), and Nancy (Natalia Dyer), an attractively elfin nerd whose role is ripped straight out of a John Hughes movie until her friend Barb goes missing at Steve's house.

If this all sounds over-engineered, it doesn't feel like it. Stranger Things feels expansive and messy, but it never like its stretching beyond what it can handle. It's a surprisingly fun show because — despite sharing major arteries with horrors and thrillers — it takes as much pleasure in its innocent conventions as it does in its adrenaline bombs. Take this spat, which rivals any teenage drama for its archetypal riff on the What Kind Of Person Are You fight:

Yowch.

There's great nerd fare: The boys' mustachioed teacher and on-call consultant Mr. Clarke (Randall P. Havens) is a major resource, but the strategic thinking the kids developed playing Dungeons and Dragons becomes important too.

There's humor: Dyer layers a kooky comedic undercurrent into her characterization of Nancy, whether she's visiting Joyce's "redecorated" house or training with a baseball bat. Ted Chrest makes Mr. Wheeler sing as one of television's most wooden and clueless dads, and Joe Keery humanizes Steve the jock with some pretty great physical comedy. David Harbour unexpectedly starts to channel Indiana Jones as Chief Hopper, and Gaten Matarazzo as Dustin ("Toothless" to the bullies, who mock him for his cleidocranial dysplasia) steals every scene he's in. It's refreshing, too, that the Duffer Brothers never once sacrifice him to the script (no fat jokes — he's matter-of-fact, an enforcer of honor codes and friendship hierarchies who's also just unbelievably smart).

Millie Bobby Brown's performance as Eleven deserves its own article entirely. She's a phenomenal actor, and as Stranger Things' fan base widens, so does hers (she's reached a #1 rating on IMDB's Star-Meter since the show dropped).

It's worth emphasizing, in fact, that despite its engaging plot twists and the adults' obvious talent, you end up watching Stranger Thing for the kids: They're where the story lives. Caleb McLaughlin plays Lucas' scrappy skeptic with so much spunk and warmth that it's impossible to find his character as annoying as he could be (let's hope McLaughlin, like Ryder, gets material with a little more range in season 2). And Finn Wolfhard, who plays Mike, the group leader, is so odd and sweet and doe-eyed I keep wondering whether he should have been cast as Ryder's son. He shares that big-eyed quietness with her.

The point is that Stranger Things is at least as good at the small-stakes stuff as it is at the grand gestures. Better, maybe: It's impossible not to be moved by the kids' conflicts and reconciliations, and these proceed according to a logic that the supernatural stuff, for all its drippy sickly snowy weight, just doesn't have. That these great young actors are entrusted with the burden of carrying something this serious is itself a nod to '80s nostalgia — a time when kids' movies were darker, scarier, and more adventurous.

It's worth saying, too — without going into specifics for fear of spoiling — that even though this is the kind of nostalgic ensemble show that lovingly reproduces the expectations of the genres it deploys, it isn't exactly subservient to them. "The sun rises in the east, and it sets in the west, right?" Dustin says, wearing the silliest tie in the world. And it does, but that doesn't mean the compass that points you there is always right.