Hedwig & The Angry Inch

Whatever one’s view of its artistic merits, the self-indulgent but startlingly honest Hedwig And The Angry Inch – winner of this year’s Sundance Prize – represents an almighty labour of love for its lead actor/writer/ director John Cameron Mitchell. The tale of a transsexual who fronts a Wayne County and the Electric Chairs-styled glam-rock band, it’s highly unlikely to out-perform the likes of American Pie 2 at the box office, but should certainly find a niche audience. Adapted from Mitchell’s own Rocky Horror-type off-Broadway musical, its sprawling plot can loosely be summarised as follows:

Lovable if hatchet-faced Hedwig uses her band The Angry Inch as a front in order to stalk her one-time lover Tommy Gnosis (‘he’s never shown any interest in the front of me’). In flashback, it becomes apparent that our eponymous heroine has commenced life as Hansel, an effeminate East German boy seduced early in life by an American GI named Luther. Hansel agrees to have a sex-change in order to marry Luther and move to the USA, but a disastrously botched operation leaves Hedwig (having adopted his mother’s name) with a mound of scar tissue instead of a vagina, henceforth to be known as ‘the angry inch’.

Luther leaves Hedwig for another young boy, and she finds herself condemned to an existence of trailer-trash hell until the fall of the Berlin Wall is broadcast on television. This inspires Hedwig to form a glam-rock band with some Korean Army wives: however, she still finds herself required to suck dicks to survive. Still amidst all the fellatio, she finds love (aahhh!) in the form of seventeen-year-old Tommy, a youthful bible-basher who becomes a famous rock-star after stealing Hedwig’s songs and passing them off as his own.

Despite tendencies towards miserable self-absorption and the ever-present spectre of Velvet Goldmine, the film certainly cuts it (sorry) as a more ingenious and spirited re-invention of the musical than either Moulin Rouge or last year’s excruciating Dancer in the Dark. To its credit, Hedwig And The Angry Inch goes a good deal of the way towards demonstrating that the American independent film-making sector doesn’t have to be imitation Hollywood fare or another variation on the inter-ethnic marriage comedy.

Something of a one-joke movie, and likely to prove overly off-beat for most, Hedwig is nonetheless heartily recommended for die-hard glam-rock fans (any of you still alive?) and persons of most indiscriminate gender.