It was the end of freshman year. And while my friends huddled together, poring over pages of notes and laptop screens for the next day’s JOUR 200 (that’s “Journalism History, Roles and Structures,”for the uninitiated) final exam, I stayed up late and watched clips from Newsies on YouTube.

Since flopping spectacularly in theaters (grossing just less than $3 million domestically), the 1992 Disney musical film has found a devoted cult following and spawned a hugely successful Broadway adaptation. Now the film is back on the big screen at the American Film Institute in Silver Spring, where it will run as part of the AFL-CIO’s DC Labor FilmFest.

So what is it that has made Newsies, so reviled at the time of its release, a cultural touchstone for the modern era? How did this “joyless” and “pointless” (as New York Times critic Janet Maslin described it) musical manage to find legs?

The film, inspired by the Newsboy Strike of 1899, was, perhaps, simply a victim of its time: The economic boom of the 1990s made all talk of the working poor and unions – which Newsies takes very seriously — seem out of place. Putting this heavy-handed pro-labor message into the template of a live-action song-and-dance flick (during the pre-High School Musical era, when the movie musical was all but dead) spelled disaster from the start.

Newsies shouldn’t work. Often, it doesn’t work. But it has a ramshackle, go-for-broke, old-school cheesiness that makes it endlessly endearing.

This rough edge starts with the music. Newsies was not originally conceived as a musical, and Alan Menken’s tunes sound like they were written on a deadline. But their tossed-off nature makes the songs seem truly spontaneous, giving the handful of musical numbers a real sense of driving urgency. Director Kenny Ortega’s athletic choreography adds to the feeling of anything-goes recklessness, as kids tumble, fight, pirouette and pelvic thrust in equal measure. (If you were to drink every time one of the newsies thrusted, you would be wasted by the end of the first two numbers – trust me on this.)

The sense of rebellious urgency extends to Jack Feldman’s often transcendent lyrics, which alternate between G-rated Disney cheese (“Carrying The Banner”), and deadly-serious workers’ anthems. (“Once And For All” is a slowly-building Marxist hymn, complete with cries to “watch how the mighty will fall/ for once and for all.”) Even the playful numbers have a sardonic edge to them: “King of New York” is a broad tap number that satirizes the newsboys’ extreme poverty, while “The World Will Know” casually drops historical wordplay (“Pulitzer may own the world/ but he don’t own us”) with a deft intelligence. Even though it is ostensibly a movie for and about kids, Newsies never coddles its audience. It’s uncut Disney schmaltz, sure, but it’s schmaltz with a rough, subtly subversive edge.

Speaking of kids, a very young Christian Bale, as newsboy leader Jack Kelly, occasionally mixes up his cockney and New York accents, but it only adds to his character’s outsider charms. Bale’s lack of vocal chops — most of his songs, including the sweeping epic “Santa Fe,” end up either shouted or talked through — make the character feel more real, closer to life than a Disney caricature really should.

This is the real divide between Newsies the film and Newsies on Broadway (which I took a pilgrimage to see over the summer). Jeremy Jordan (stepping into Bale’s role) delivered a soaring, pitch-perfect “Santa Fe,” free from the strangled yelps and stiff dancing that made Bale’s performance feel so realistic and personal. Aggressive pelvic thrusting was replaced with graceful ballet. Though the musical loses none of its youthful energy onstage, the show is polished and professional, almost to a fault. The rough-hewn grittiness of the movie is lost, glossed over with a slick, almost mechanical sheen.

The show is undoubtedly one of the best things on the Great White Way right now, but one can’t help but notice the energy and work that went into making it. Newsies the film, on the other hand, feels spontaneous and refreshingly handcrafted. It’s a populist film made by a mega-corporation, but it feels more like a shaggy underdog — wild and fun and slightly dangerous — that just wants to be loved.

DC Labor FilmFest runs October 11-18 at the AFI Silver Theatre. Newsies will be played Sunday, Oct. 14 at 2:45 and Wednesday, Oct. 17, at 4:40. Tickets are $11.50.