I AM DIVINE How one fearless performer attacked the world, ate dog poop, and became a star.
  • I AM DIVINE How one fearless performer attacked the world, ate dog poop, and became a star.

The 2013 Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival packs an extravagant array of films into ten days of queer filmy goodness, starting with tonight's opening-night feature I Am Divine. As I wrote in my SLGFF preview:

One of the many revelatory elements of I Am Divine—the new documentary about the legendary drag-queen performance artist and the opening-night film of SLGFF 2013—is the careful parsing of credit in Divine's creation. Makeup artist Van Smith is the one who shaved back Divine's hairline, creating a vast expanse for explosively dramatic eyebrow situations. Filmmaker John Waters is the one who urged his friend Glenn Milstead to channel his anger—over daily beatings in high school, over being a fat queer kid rotting in Baltimore—into the character of Divine. But beyond this, it was all Divine creating Divine, a fearless gender warrior who means as much to the history of punk as the history of drag, and one of America's great movie stars.

Directed by Jeffrey Schwarz, I Am Divine covers all its biopic bases well. Kicking off with the premiere of Hairspray—Divine and John Waters's 1988 mainstream breakthrough—the film tracks back to Milstead's privileged but lonely childhood in Baltimore, carries us through the birth and reign of Divine, and gathers voluminous evidence of Divine's star power to make his premature death land as it should. ("I still can't believe he's dead," says Waters, with love and light bafflement.) Beyond the basics, Schwarz shines plenty of light into less-investigated corners of the story: Divine's love life (robust!), pot habit (robust!), and career beyond the John Waters universe (from off-Broadway plays to international disco hits). Bookending the film are stories from Divine's high-drama family saga, which I won't spoil for you here, but which will muss much mascara among audiences. (Bring a tissue.)

Watch the I Am Divine trailer below, find full info on tonight's Cinerama screening here, and if you want to take your exposure to the world of John Waters and Divine to the next level (which you should), don't miss the Saturday extravaganza hosted by Ian Bell, mastermind behind the beloved Brown Derby readings, who'll here present a "ridiculously staged reading" of the screenplay to John Waters' forever-unproduced Pink Flamingos sequel Flamingos Forever.