A wigged-out “queer” musical with original music and lyrics, real singing and no Seventies disco? There’s fifty bonus points straight away. Hedwig’s (punk-)rockin’ soundtrack is composed and performed by John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask, who apparently met on a plane before creating the Hedwig act for a New York rock and roll drag bar. Mitchell – who also writes, directs, and plays the title role here – is an accomplished actor who starred in the original Broadway production of “Six Degrees of Separation” and who played Hedwig off Broadway for several smash hit years. There’s real creativity and talent behind this top film.
About the only thing wrong with it is the presence of some very unwelcome late-Nineties queer identity politics, which raise their cloying sentimental heads more than once. Why such an original and intelligent film has to occasionally collapse into tinny convention is anyone’s guess, and the ending of the film was tremendously disappointing to me, but if these lapses can be ignored, the film is a scratchy joy.
And it’s easy to ignore them, with Mitchell’s amazingly charismatic performance and blue-ribbon dialogue and in every scene of the film. Hedwig’s draggy stage persona is sterling, his audience rapport and autocratic attitude just the right comic balance to his angry and heartbroken - and perfectly delivered - songs.
Hedwig used to be Hansel, a sensitive but restless Eastern German boy who lived with his mother in a tiny flat on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. Opportunity knocks in the shape of an amourous American soldier, and a sex change operation is organised to allow Hansel to immigrate to the free world as a US Army wife. The botched operation leaves Hedwig genital-free, an inch thick mound of flesh all she has left to work with, as she describes it. After her husband dumps for for a younger, prettier boy, Hedwig hooks up with a introverted hottie, Tommy Speck (Michael Pitt) by following him to his devoutly Christian home and jerking him off in the bath. Hedwig grooms Tommy into rock star Tommy Gnosis but Tommy steals their songs and runs off as soon as he starts to make it big. With her band, the Angry Inch, Hedwig shadows Tommy’s sell out stadium tour, playing in a chain of low-rent diners.
So the movie is a chain of songs strung together with a basic rock and roll movie story. Will the teen idol star acknowledge his more talented, but less marketable, other half, and will our tortured hero ever find a meaningful life off stage without the help of hair and make up? Purple Rain meets Rocky Horror.
Unfortunately, Hedwig is so vividly drawn and so brilliantly realised that the minute the movie ventures into real-life, it stumbles. Betraying the movie’s stage origins, the star role crackles with the complexity and slick expertise only hundreds of performances can give. But like every other character in the film, off-stage Hedwig seems to have been thrown in at the last minute, and every time the camera zooms in on him all we see is a chorus boy who’s accidentally and very awkwardly been caught in the spotlight and doesn’t know what to do.
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