A Towering Inch
It's more than just drag. It's a great movie.

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH
With John Cameron Mitchell, Andrea Martin, Miriam Shor, Michael Pitt
Written by John Cameron Mitchell, based on his play
Music and lyrics by Stephen Trask
Directed by John Cameron Mitchell

YOU NEED TO BE a little careful when you talk about Hedwig and the Angry Inch, John Cameron Mitchell’s frenetic film version of his popular and intelligent off-Broadway play.

Call it a musical and you’ll overlook the sight gags and sophisticated barbs. Call it a comedy and you’ll slight the bittersweet love stories that winnow through Cameron’s trenchant script. You could call it a post-modern melange of blah blah blah, but that’s too trite and boring by now. And yes, it’s somewhat campy, but not in a way that makes you want to roll your eyes or bitch-slap someone.

So why not simply relax and enjoy Mitchell’s brainy, cheesy, and incredibly fun personal journey through the life of a character who’s certainly nothing like his creator. And yet, as Hedwig and the Angry Inch unfolds, you sense that Mitchell is telling a story that means something powerful to him, albeit in a flamboyantly round-about way.

The story of Hedwig Robinson (Mitchell) begins in Berlin in 1961 - the year the Wall went up - when his East German mother and American G.I. father create little Hansel, who knows from early childhood that he’s different. His father sexually abuses him, his mother makes him play with his head stuck in the oven (heat turned off). Most people fled to the West for freedom after the Wall. But Hansel’s deranged mother fled East into oppression because she equated Hitler with Jesus and believed it was better to be powerless than free.

Her embittered philosophy creates a child who finds himself in an anguished search for his emotional freedom, his sexual identity and, above all, his psychological other half. At age 27, never having kissed a boy, the lonely, dreamy, eccentric Hansel seems to find what he wants: He’s Luther, a nurturing American soldier from Kansas who marries him in East Berlin, but only after coaxing him, with promises of love, into a botched sex change operation (hence the title’s "angry inch"). They go to the U.S., where Luther promptly dumps him for a younger boy, leaving Hansel alone in a trailer park in monster truck country.

So Hansel transforms himself into Hedwig, a plucky-cum-bitter glam-rock drag-queen singer/songwriter. Eventually he forms a band, which he names after his dismembered member, and which plays in dive bars and on the side stage (next to the outhouses) at women’s festivals like Menses Fair. He has a maternal agent (Andrea Martin) looking after his so-called career, and among his band is his devoted lover and hard-rockin’ bassist Yitzhak, a scruffy, scrappy, bearded Russian - portrayed, in a disorienting casting choice, by actress Miriam Shor - who dreams of his own spinoff stardom in a cruise-ship production of Rent.

All of this would be enough for an edgy drag show and a tongue-in-cheek treatise on the seductive mendacity of show-biz fame. Mitchell, whose singing soars to power-ballad and Broadway-rock heights, vividly performs Stephen Trask’s flashy mix of faintly satirical styles that range from proto-punk, Ziggy-glam and acid rock to show tunes in the contempo-rhythm of theatrical pop-opera. Trask’s score is a mini-history of pop music since the late ‘60s, although thank goodness he doesn’t compose like the musicians whom Hedwig most admires (Anne Murray, Toni Tennille, Debbie Boone, etc.).

But there’s another story, an especially poignant one, in midst of Mitchell’s fanciful melodrama. Hedwig is obsessed with Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt), a baby-faced teen idol with whom, unbeknownst to Tommy’s little-girl fans, Hedwig has a history.

Before Tommy was a rock star, he was a 17-year-old force-fed holy roller from Kansas with sexual feelings he doesn’t understand and a desperate desire to know things about life that his Bible can’t explain. So Hedwig teaches him with a hand job in the bathtub and eventually thrusts him into the spotlight as a singer whose star rises fast on songs stolen from Hedwig, leaving his lovesick mentor stalking his special boy on a cross-country tour.

From all of this pain, we and Hedwig learn to take off our wigs and makeup and to stand up on stage and sing to the crowd as who we really are. It’s a good lesson, and one that bears repeating until our collective culture gets used to it. Mitchell's movie is relentlessly tender amidst all its suffering, so you can enjoy it solely for its edification, or you can just rock to the music, laugh at the jokes, revel in the headgear, and embrace the heartache when Hedwig and Tommy finally have it out in torch song.

Mitchell performs seamless work here as writer, director and star: He clearly adores this character, so rather than turning him into a self-absorbed camp joke, he plays it icy cool most of the time and lets the syrupy lyrics, brittle narrative and wry narration tell Hedwig’s tale. And Pitt - who appeared for a while on Dawson’s Creek, and who plays a puerile thrill-killer in Larry Clark’s upcoming Bully - brings a graceful nuance to the conflicted Tommy. With his powdery skin and pouty lips, he’s an emerging ingenue/waif of a new generation of young stars courageous enough to go places that the Brat Pack never dared.