Hedwig And The Angry Inch Details

Writer/director John Cameron Mitchell adapts his successful off-Broadway rock musical and has a game try at opening up this erratic “rags to bitches” biography of a fictional German transsexual singer (played by Mitchell himself, reviving his stage role for the big screen). Using surreal flashbacks, camp humour, crude animation and glam rock songs, Hedwig is introduced as a young boy called Hansel living in East Berlin before the Wall came down. Having a sex-change operation — which doesn't go quite as planned — to marry a GI and escape to America, Hedwig then has her music and lyrics ripped off by pop sensation Tommy Gnosis. The gender-bending diva subsequently spends her time bemoaning her lot during desperate gigs in seafood restaurants with her band, the Angry Inch. Very much a love it or hate it experience, Mitchell's directorial debut will either seem a poignant trawl through hilarious 1970s trash culture complete with mock David Bowie tunes or a totally dated combination of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Lily Savage on stage. However, limited cult appeal beckons.

"...HEDWIG is an exhilarating reinvention of the movie musical....Mitchell plays with the medium, blending flashbacks, fantasies, even bits of clever animation into a brilliantly stylized whole..."