Don't procrastinate, see this now

Rating: 9/10 (30 April 2007)

Good lord, I've had this movie recommended to me by many different people, but I still didn't expect for it to be this good! The reason I held it off was due to expectations--I figured it was a mock-rock flick that had Rocky Horror aspirations. I couldn't have been more wrong!
I've never been a fan of glam rock, but this movie does it right and does it well. John Cameron Mitchell shows himself to not only be a stunning visual storyteller but an amazingly poignant narrator. Between interesting and well-written songs that actually really help develop the psychology of the character are expository anecdotes that range from tragic to poetic. Mitchell is not only comfortable playing a transsexual but stunningly plays a transsexual that only thinks she's completely comfortable playing a transsexual. Hedwig is a fascinating character, and "Hedwig & the Angry Itch" is a well-made character study. What makes it all the more remarkable is its uniqueness.
Michael Pitt makes an interesting costar as Johnny Gnosis, the glam rock superstar who stole his music from Hedwig. It's a hilarious and ironic statement, considering that Hedwig's music is very much about things that Johnny Gnosis is very, VERY obviously not: coming from East Berlin, being a transsexual, involving onesself with music from a very early age. Yet as the denouement reveals, there's a surprising amount of Johnny Gnosis within Hedwig, making a very bizarre doppelganger story with too many associations for me to get into right now. Whatever the case, the ending to this movie is just as haunting as the rest of this movie is entertaining.
"Hedwig and the Angry Itch" is not a movie to be missed, though it does seem to recognize its own confrontational nature. It's a movie about someone unlike anybody you've ever met but who you relate entirely to like a mirror image or a sister. It's a glam-rock fest of color and kitsch. And it's a haunting commentary on stardom and dreams.
--PolarisDiB