Hedwig and the Angry Inch
This film blew me away. It's based on an off-Broadway play of the same name that ran for two years. It's about a drag queen who endures an unhappy, unloving childhood in East Berlin. As a young man, he falls in love with an American GI and finds himself in a trailer park in Kansas. There's a lot of story between those two points, but I don't want to spoil any surprises. The film opens with Hedwig and his band, The Angry Inch, playing at a Bilgewater's restaurant, which is a chain of fish (I wouldn't say "sea-food") restaurants that must barely be a step above Long John Silver's. The group is on a "world tour" of Bilgewater's restaurants across the U.S. What they're actually doing is following Tommy Gnosis, a rock "icon" who happened to steal Hedwig's music as well as his heart. While Tommy is playing stadiums, Hedwig is maneuvering around the salad bar. There's a lot of comedy here, but the comedy is a defense mechanism. It allows the audience to deal with the ever-present undercurrent of pain that permeates the film. That might make it sound like a downer, but it's not. It has an intense energy that blends the pain and comedy to let you take it seriously enough to care and empathize for Hedwig, but it never wants to break you down.
Summary by Bill Alward, February 10, 2002
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