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Hedwig and the Angry Inch opens with a roar – “Don’t you know me, Kansas City? I’m the new Berlin Wall. Try and tear me down!” – and never flags for 90 minutes of rock musical that just may breathe new life back into this moribund genre.

Hedwig, the “internationally ignored song stylist” from communist East Berlin, tours the seedier establishments of the United States in a shadow tour of her one-time lover, Tommy Gnosis, who has stolen her material and soared to stardom. Born the same year the Berlin Wall was erected, Hedwig (née Hansel) suffers the permanent effects of a botched sex change operation performed so that s/he could flee East Berlin with her new American GI husband and sugar daddy supreme, Luther. After Luther abandons her in a Kansas trailer park for a younger man, however, Hedwig rallies herself and mines her undying devotion to rock-and-roll and pop ballads, first playing the drab holes near the military base and later launching her national tour with her husband, Yitzhak, and crew.

Hedwig’s story unfolds in a series of songs, stories, and flashbacks, told to a few admiring fans and the rest of the stunned patrons of the various Bilgewater establishments into which her energetic manager books her and her band, the Angry Inch – a constant, visceral reminder of what transpired on the “doctor’s slab.” As doubles of her audience, we, too, perhaps, are initially stunned by her tale, but are fully won over by a story that is raw and heartbreaking, and conveyed with sincerity and utter abandonment.

It seems entirely appropriate that Hedwig would be released as a feature film in the same summer as the fortieth anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall. Indeed, not only is Hedwig’s biography closely linked to the Wall, but the construction of the Wall, the divisions the Wall represented, and the lingering political and national ambiguities in the wake of its demolition, serve as constant metaphors for Hedwig’s own story. The irony is lost neither on her nor on us that the drastic actions undertaken to enable her to leave East Berlin would have been obviated just one short year later by the Wall’s collapse. As the opening song intones: “We thought the Wall would stand forever, and now that it’s gone, we don’t know who we are anymore. Ladies and gentlemen, Hedwig is like that Wall. Standing before you on a divide between East and West, slavery and freedom, man and woman….”

The image of a split, and the subsequent search for wholeness and shared identity, are constant themes throughout the film, whether in the references to Berlin (“a town ripped in two”) or most overtly in the masterful ballad, “Origin of Love.” This seemingly simple song – which recounts the theory of love from Plato’s Symposium that, having been split into two by vengeful gods, human beings must spend their lifetimes looking for their other halves – engages complex questions of identity and loss, which gain poignancy for not being limited to gender ambiguities. The playful, yet powerful, animation sequence by Emily Hubley unites this ancient text, not only with Hedwig’s plight but also with the political, ideological, racial, and sexual divisions that divide us all.

Hedwig’s stage presence and singing is clearly influenced by the music that she heard in East Berlin over Armed Forces Radio, when she was still young Hansel, dancing with abandon on his bed (much to the chagrin of his mother). Indeed, rock-and-roll is not (or at least, not only) idealized as a route to fame and stardom – the traitorous Tommy Gnosis is criticized for having bought into the falsity of that soulless exploitation of music – but as a way of bridging divides and helping us to dream. In “Sugar Daddy,” Hedwig sings about the “rush of rock and roll,” and it is indeed a rush that we in the audience experience from this music, composed by Stephen Trask and performed by John Cameron Mitchell. Hedwig is a combination of her singing heroes, bringing the pop sweetness of Toni Tenille and Debbie Boone into collision with the wit and audaciousness of Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and David Bowie, and the howling rage of punk rock. The Hedwig tour is all glam, all the time – and an unparalleled advertisement for the cosmetics industry, stonewashed denim, and blonde hairpieces (lovingly draped on individual wig stands on every available surface of Hedwig’s various hotel rooms).

The film takes us on a glorious romp through decades of image-making and image-selling in America – most notably in the stupendous “Wig in a Box” sequence, in which Hedwig first reveals her drive to go on after Luther has abandoned her. Cataloguing trends and fashions from cocktails and entertainment systems to hairstyles, the song and staging are all about our own image obsessions from the 1950s through the late 1980s – and the ever-increasing presence of these images in our lives. The song leads us through various chronological transformations, from the lowly checkout girl who aspires to be a beauty-pageant contestant to Farrah Fawcett to, finally, a punk-rock star of stage and screen (this last in obvious reference to the massive transformations of Courtney Love, of which our image- and tabloid-obsessed culture keep us current). The song culminates as the house in which Hedwig is singing literally loses its “fourth wall” to become a rock-concert stage in the middle of the desolate Kansas prairie, emitting its signal to all those lonely hearts and dreamers across the country.

This highly stylized sequence is one of the most self-consciously “performative” scenes in the film. It even pokes fun at its own over-the-top self by incorporating a bouncing ball sing-along. Or, perhaps, the film slyly winks, we are witnessing the new sound of music, and, henceforth, sold-out movie theaters won’t be seating the dirndl-wearing crowd, but will be packed with Hed-heads in yellow Styrofoam headgear deliriously singing along.

The film successfully navigates an extremely difficult challenge, namely, how to reconceptualize the original stage show (which played to adoring crowds in New York City) into a feature film without losing the edge and electricity that made it so successful in the first place. Despite the obvious loss of a physical presence, we in the audience actually feel closer to this screen image of Hedwig. For although John Cameron Mitchell continues to play in broad gestures, his attention to detail and nuance bring us in closer contact with the character’s inner life. In other words, Hedwig is played both larger than life and utterly realistically. And the pain and poignancy of her story are intensified rather than masked by the musical performances. The contrast of Hedwig with Tommy Gnosis is played to good effect in this respect. Tommy is all image with no soul, who neither understands the symbolism of his name, his facial paint, nor the meaning of his songs (in one scene, Hedwig listens to Tommy sing “Origin of Love” and realizes he mistakes the name of one of the ancient gods).

After watching Hedwig in all of her rage and glory, it is jolting to see her strip away her persona as the film closes. Finally embraced by adoring crowds – even fêted on the cover of New York magazine – Hedwig seems to realize that her own anger has created a stranger capable of unimagined cruelty. Stripped of her finery, Hedwig turns over the show to Yitzhak, who, deprived of his chance of joining the overseas tour of Rent, finally revels in the spotlight of the rocker. Hedwig exits the film, naked and engulfed by the streets of New York, in search, perhaps, of an identity that was lost long ago. For even with the divide bridged and the Wall torn down, unification as a true merging remains an ideal that, whether in love or politics, can never be fulfilled.

In the meantime, we’ll be listening for those transmissions on the midnight radio. Hedwig takes the “good stuff” and runs with it.