Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001, R)

Expect a few Hedwig-related posts in the coming days.  There’s plenty that I love about this off-Broadway-show-turned-cult-film (we’re looking at the movie today,) and the murkiness of its trans representation warrants discussion.  For now, though, we’re starting simple with a review of this bizarre but highly-enjoyable film.

What you need to know:  Hedwig is an East German rocker currently touring America’s nationwide chain of Bilgewater restaurants.  She was born male but underwent gender reassignment surgery in order to marry her American G.I. beau and get to the U.S.; no time to unpack all this today, but it’s coming, believe me.  Unfortunately, the operation was bungled, leaving her with an “angry inch” (also the name of her band) in the nether regions.  This history is rolled out gradually over the course of her wildly-inappropriate restaurant gigs, along with her past with rock god Tommy Gnosis, a former collaborator who won fame from Hedwig’s music.

So, yeah.  Not something you see every day.  Hedwig is wild and raucous, with a campy sense of humor and a flair for the outrageous.  Hedwig herself is a piece of work – her songwriting and singing talent is undeniable, and there’s no doubt that she’s been kicked around far more than her fair share, but she’s also vain, demanding, and vindictive.  She has a powerful need to be the prettiest, she requires nothing less than the audience’s full attention, and she lets her grievances against Tommy make most of her decisions for her.  Still, she’s an absolute hoot and imminently watchable, and the film follows her journey that, at its core, is to find some peace for herself.

The music is just phenomenally good.  Penned by Stephen Trask (who, incidentally, also composed the film score for The Station Agent,) these are genuinely gritty rock numbers that don’t sound like anything else you hear in musical theatre.  The songs don’t tell the story in the traditional musical sense – there are no characters bursting into song to advance the plot.  Instead, they’re generally framed as performances, with the odd dream sequence or music-video-style tangent here and there.  They still provide a lot of insight into the story, however, because Hedwig writes extensively from her own experiences.  Through her performances, we get her feelings on love, gender, her origins, and her ever-present sense that she has her feet in two different camps and is never entirely one thing or the other.

In the cast, the main attraction is John Cameron Mitchell as Hedwig.  He created the show, originated the role off-Broadway, and has played it multiple times onstage since then, so there’s no one who knows the hard-edged rock diva quite as well as him.  Michael Pitt, who gave us a wonderfully creepy Mason Verger on Hannibal, really works as Tommy, and I just love Miriam Shor in the role of Yitzhak, Hedwig’s backup singer and long-suffering boyfriend?/husband?/something or other.

Warnings

Thematic elements, sexual content (including offscreen hand jobs and oodles of innuendo,) swearing, and drinking.