It's funny when a piece of art falls right in to your life at a time when you seem to need to hear it's message. It's happened a couple times in mine. One of the biggest examples in my life was the Key: The Metal Idol anime series. More recently, it has been Hedwig and the Angry Inch. So I've moved on from Key, a little robot girl trying to become human, to Hedwig, a transsexual rock star trying to find herself.

Is my life screwed up or what?

More seriously, Hedwig is by far the more surprising of the two because transsexuality is something that I've never been comfortable with and, for the most part, still am not. Yet by the time I was done with this movie, I felt that I had everything in common with her, minus the musical talent and sex change operation.

What helped tremendously in this regard was how inconspicuously it dealt with the issue. Instead of making this an anthem about tolerance towards transexuality or martyring Hedwig as a victim in a cold, transgenderophobic society, it merely presents a character, tells how he becomes a she, and what happens to her. The reactions of all the characters around her are genuine as is John Mitchell's portrayal of Hedwig.

Hedwig was born Hansel Schmidt in Communist East Berlin. She gained an affection for western culture by listening to the American Forces Network, which played American music and such television shows as "Jesus Was Good."

Along comes an American sergeant named Luthor Robinson (picture Toby Keith, except bald, black, and bisexual), who originally thinks Hansel to be a girl and, when he finds out otherwise, doesn't seem to mind so much. After all, when they get married, he has to become a girl to get out of the country.

Then comes the botched sex change operation, leaving Hedwig with "an angry inch."

That's all the backstory for how "a slip of a girly boy from East Berlin becomes the Internationally ignored song stylist barely standing before you," in her words.

The story of Hedwig's adventures through life are interesting in a bizarre way, but wouldn't have been able to carry the story for someone like me who is intrinsically uncomfortable with transexualism. What is most powerful to me is the same thing that brought me to the movie to begin with: The Origin of Love.

I first heard the song in my friend Ed's car and it struck me as one of the most interesting songs I'd heard in a long time. The story of how we all had four arms and legs and two heads until we angered the gods who then seperated us. Thus we spend the rest of our lives in search for the part we were seperated from, searching for "the other half" of us.

The Jerry Maguirish notion of "you complete me" is not one I necessarily buy in to, and yet I have had that feeling when I've been in love before that without that other person, I'd be somehow an incomplete person. As I'd been single for most of the two years prior to seeing the movie, the feeling that something was seriously missing from my life stayed with me, however much I wished to lose it.

And so it is with Hedwig, who spends the greater part of the movie in search for her counterpart until she is eventually reduced with dealing from the wreckage of her relationship with rock star Tommy Gnosis, who left her and made a name for himself off her material.

On Hedwig's thigh is a tatoo of two halfs of a circle, a yin-yang of sorts except that they're not connected. Without Tommy, and without that other person, she is merely a broken half in search of the other.

The most tragic element of all of this is that Hedwig is, on her own, such a remarkably talented musician and songwriter. Her lyrics are exemplary, her voice magnificent, and her appearence wholly sensual. Songs that she wrote propelled Gnosis, whose voice is centrally inferior, to stardom.

Yet, despite all of this, she keeps coming back to the broken circle. The incompleteness that seems to drive her being. It also impairs her songwriting.

"Why don't you write a new song?!" her husband Yitzak asks. In a sense she can't. A number of her songs deal with the surgery that left her understably feeling sexually incomplete.

It's been said that a musician's first CD is always their easiest. The material is the artist's life. One of the reasons for the so-called "sophomore jinx" is the inability of some writers to find something else to write about.

Hedwig is in a similar rut. She's trapped in her past, the surgery, the ex-husband, and the rock star.

The last ten to fifteen minutes of the movie is three songs. Her struggle coming to head, her long awaited confrontation with Tommy, and the resolution.

In a way, it's a fitting way for the movie to end. The plot is interesting, the characters immensely believable, and the movie's focus on the characters rather than making it a "we're loud, we're transexual, and we're proud" statement. But the best part of the movie is the music. Three of the best songs I have heard to date come from the soundtrack.

I got the DVD through Netflix and watched it over and over again. First the movie, then the song portions, then the movie again. It even includes an 85-minute "making of Hedwig" feature on the DVD which details its transition from an idea to stage musical to film. I'd give almost anything to see a stage production, but I own both soundtracks (one from the musical and the other the movie) and the DVD, which will have to make do until the tribute album comes out.

If you appreciate an interesting story and great music, I strongly advise you to check out this movie.