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Wow, what to say about Hedwig and the Angry Inch? It's decidedly not in the category of "mainstream Hollywood movie," that's for sure. Much of it, perhaps even most of it, is told through rock songs. That's unusual enough, the musical being such a moribund form in the halls of cinema as they're currently constituted, but what really raises the roof is the story itself.
Hedwig is the story of a...okay, I'm going to use the word "man" here, for the sake of convenience...a man who was born in East Berlin. Not long after that, the Berlin Wall goes up, his American G.I. father disappears, and he spends his childhood growing up in a small apartment with his mother, jamming to rock-and-roll tunes heard on the radio. One day, when he's in his twenties, he meets an American army sergeant. They have an affair and fall in love; the sergeant wants to take him home to America with him, but there's a slight problem, in that they're both men. So the sergeant convinces Hedwig to have a sex-change operation, which is botched. Yes, the "angry inch" refers to the tattered remnants of Hedwig's genitalia (thus providing the chorus line for one of the songs: "Six inches forward and five inches back...I've got an angry inch!"). Still, they marry, move to a trailer park in middle America, and then split up soon after.
This is all told in flashback. In the present, Hedwig and his band is following hard on the trail of Tommy Gnosis, a lad who has just hit the big time in the music world (front cover of Rolling Stone, sold out concerts, etc.) using songs that Hedwig wrote or helped him to write. Hedwig is playing gigs in crowded little family diners to handfuls of bewildered bourgeois. They're particularly bewildered, no doubt, because Hedwig performs as an excessively made-up glam queen, with the outfits and the winged blond wig to prove it.
It's a loopy story, but it's kind of fun, and at its center is Hedwig and his search for love and recognition. I quite enjoyed almost all of the songs that are in the movie; they're pretty catchy little rock tunes. John Cameron Mitchell is quite good in the title role of Hedwig. Generally speaking, I have little or no interest in the drag queen scene as such, but I have to say that Hedwig and the Angry Inch is, all things considered, quite a watchable, even interesting, movie.
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