I Am Divine *** (2013, Glenn Milstead) – Movie Review

The 2013 documentary feature film I Am Divine offers a poignant, insightful portrait of the drag queen, gay icon and cinematic muse of film director John Waters, the late, great Glenn Milstead. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable, revealing documentary of its turbulent times, very funny, then very sad.

Emmy Award-winning film-maker Jeffrey Schwarz tells the whole divine story in his rousing biographical documentary about Harris Glenn Milstead, a plump, plain, misfit Baltimore boy who magically transformed himself into his glamorous alter ego, the celebrated, sometimes rather scary international drag icon Divine.

It’s a celebration of the unique individual, with some informative, warm and perceptive interviews (with Waters, Tab Hunter, Mink Stole, Ricki Lake and Glenn’s mom, Frances Milstead) helping to propel the momentum of the great, lovingly researched and assembled archive footage, including a ‘scandalous’ Top of the Pops appearance from his disco phase that landed him on the front page of UK papers.

Glenn met Waters at high school in Baltimore, they became good friends and the two combined as star and director of several ultra-low-budget, taboo breaking cult films of the early 1970s. Happy days!

The film is enormous fun for the most part, hugely and exuberantly entertaining, like its subject, but poignant too, and then desperately sad at the end as Glenn becomes increasingly obese and suddenly dies of sleep apnea, aged only 42 in 1988 the night before he was to begin shooting his TV series Married with Children. In the desperately sad but then poignant too department, his reunion and reconciliation with the prejudiced family he walked out on is touchingly shown.

Sad though some of it is, mostly I Am Divine is a salute to a misfit, rebel without a cause struggling to live a happy life in the prejudiced America of the 60s and 70s. His family just wanted Glenn to be happy, but that meant they wanted a happy ‘normal’ kid of course. It’s remarkable, though, that his now late mom did come round to his way of thinking.

American actor, singer and drag performer Divine (October 19, 1945 – March 7, 1988) was born Harris Glenn Milstead.

I Am Divine is produced and directed by Jeffrey Schwarz of the Los Angeles-based production company Automat Pictures.

The film features extensive contemporary interviews with John Waters, Tab Hunter, Ricki Lake, Mink Stole, George Figgs, Bruce Vilanch, Lisa Jane Persky, David DeCoteau, Susan Lowe, Mary Vivian Pearce, Jackie Beat, Peaches Christ, Tammie Brown, Michael Musto, Holly Woodlawn, and Frances Milstead.

Appearing in archive footage are Harris Glenn Milstead/ Divine, Edith Massey, David Lochary, Leo Ford, George Masters, Tally Brown, and Van Smith.

It was first shown at South by Southwest (SXSW) on March 9, 2013, and had its premiere in Divine’s hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, as part of the Maryland Film Festival 2013.

Following Hunter’s participation in I Am Divine, Hunter’s life partner, the producer Allan Glaser, approached Jeffrey Schwarz about the potential of adapting Hunter’s autobiography Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star (2005) into a feature-length documentary. It became the 2015 documentary film Tab Hunter Confidential. Hunter appeared with Divine in the films Polyester and Lust in the Dust.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

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