Staff Picks: Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)

Staff Picks 2026 @ Moxie Cinema
Every month a member of the Moxie staff picks a film that impacted their lives and we put it up on the big screen. The Staff Picks series is Free for Members.
June's pick was made by Ezra Farrar.

With this trailblazing musical, writer-director-star John Cameron Mitchell and composer-lyricist Stephen Trask brought their signature creation from stage to screen for a movie as unclassifiable as its protagonist. Raised a boy in East Berlin, Hedwig (Mitchell) undergoes a traumatic personal transformation in order to emigrate to the U.S., where she reinvents herself as an “internationally ignored” but divinely talented rock diva, characterized by Mitchell as inhabiting a “beautiful gender of one.” The film tells Hedwig’s story through her music, an eclectic assortment of original punk anthems and power ballads by Trask, matching them with a freewheeling cinematic mosaic of music-video fantasies, animated interludes, and moments of bracing emotional realism. A hard-charging song cycle and a tender character study, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a tribute to the transcendent power of rock and roll. [Criterion]

Starring: John Cameron Mitchell, Miriam Shor, Michael Pitt
Director: John Cameron Mitchell
Genre(s): Comedy, Musical, Drama