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.

I love how Hedwig and The Angry Inch is queerly tantalizing and unapologetically morose. I find this movie to be So glam and So punk, and soundtrack of Hedwig’s journey resonated with me while in the depths of discovering my gender identity and self-confidence. Read Ezra's full Q & A here.

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