Hedwig and the Angry Inch is an ingenious bit of musical theater turned film that is every bit as entertaining as Rocky Horror Picture Show. John Cameron Mitchell (who also wrote the wonderfully intelligent script and co-wrote the films stunning score) turns in absolutely fabulous performance as the title character, a would-be rock and roll Diva with a bizarre history. Also starring as Skszp (Hedwig's lead guitarist) is Steven Trask, who co-wrote this marvelous score that's equal parts Bowie, the Beatles and Rocky Horror.

Hedwig's plight begins in East Germany, a young boy living with a nutjob of a mother played by Alberta Watson. Searching for a way to escape his oppressive life Hansel (Hedwig) contrives to marry an American GI - but in order to satisfy the Communist-controlled border patrol, he must undergo a sex change operation. Fatefully he falls prey to a quack of a surgeon who leaves Hansel neither a boy or a girl. The result of the botched operation leaves the boy with an angry inch of a useless Barbi Doll sexual anatomy, that allows her to escape East Berlin - but leaves her/him scarred for life and fixes her fate as Hedwig.

In another cruel twist of fate, Hedwig winds up in Kansas and is right away abandoned in a trailer court, when her GI Joe leaves her for another man. Through the use of wonderfully witty wordplay, excellent acting and some truly compelling musical numbers (that incorporate some striking cartoon imagery) Mitchell and Trask manage to make this twisted tale seem perfectly normal and the emotions universal.

In drag Hedwig makes a fairly attractive woman and even bears a bit of a resemblance to Juliet Lewis. Most of the details of her back-story we learn from flashbacks, as in the present Hedwig is schlepping from crappy gig to crappy gig as the leader of a bar-band of course called Hedwig and the Angry Inch. They are in the midst of a tacky tour playing in a chain of hotel-bars known as Bilgewaters. Andrea Martin is solid as the band's manager and Hedwig is engaged in a relationship with a player in the band named Yitzhak. Her lover is also androgynous and is billed as Miriam Shor, but I will never be dissuaded from believing Yitzhak is actually Johnny Depp. After an exhaustive Google investigation I've been unable to find a picture of the mysterious Miriam Shor, though imdb has her in a handful of other obscure films, I'm not convinced they exist and none offer any photos. I can only imagine what a goofy conspiracy theory this must sound like, and I suppose I could be wrong, but seeing is believing and I have to believe many of you must share my suspicion.

It turns out that Hedwig and her crew are shadowing the stadium tour of a rock star named Tommy Gnosis, whom we learn, has gained his stardom after stealing the songs he wrote with Hedwig during an earlier relationship. Tommy, as Hedwig describes him, was a classic rock loving, Dungeons and Dragons obsessed Jesus freak who as it turns out was a kid who Hedwig used to baby-sit. In one of the films more hilarious sequences we see a young Tommy (Michael Pitt) masturbating in the tub while watching Hedwig vacuum. Hedwig picks up on the boys autoerotic splashing, sneaks in and finishes the job for him in short order, then drops her business card in the tub for Tommy to find as he collects his wits.

The film studies the budding love affair between the two, Tommy the lovestruck kid who is being taught about the ways of love as well as how to play his guitar and write songs with it, and Hedwig also smitten by the beautiful manchild. If you haven't seen the film I won't give away the ending, suffice it to say that Hedwig gets a measure of hard-won acknowledgment.

This is in my opinion a more entertaining, if not as nearly as campy and far-flung, film than Rocky Horror. I liked the music a good deal more, it flies along on the strength of a far more intelligent and multi-layered script and the acting performances bear up amazingly well viewing after viewing. The centerpiece song called "The Origin of Love" tells an ingenious story about how humans were originally four-armed and four-legged creatures with two faces, but were split in half by the lightening of the gods and have ever since had to seek other people to complete them. This song is integral to Hedwig's central themes; and fittingly is just a fantastically poignant musical and visual piece. Hedwig's whole life centered around her quest for his/her other half; and I suppose the major question Hedwig and the Angry Inch poses is whether or not such a thing is truly necessary.