Brilliant directing and writing by John Cameron Mitchell (he gave us "Hedwig"), and great acting from everyone, especially Justin Bond, Lindsay Beamish, Paul Dawson and PJ Deboy. Great musical numbers too! You'll laugh and cry, and come away wanting to see it again immediately. Much has been made of a few rather intimate and well-lit sex scenes, but if anyone over 16 can't handle them, he or she shouldn't be out at night.
It's all ultimately wondrous, and one of the great revelations of the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, where the audiences tend to be snotty and conspicuously unimpressed--but the screening of this movie was followed by parades and parties in the streets, with people carrying the stars on their shoulders, like they used to do with Verdi on opening nights in Milan. Lynne Cheney, sly pornographer that she is, will be eating her heart out that someone has gotten at last to the real g-spot of the cosmos, and it wasn't she what did it.
Love may be grim at times, kind of like Kansas, but Mitchell turns it into technicolor. Just like magic.
