In and Out.

A person could turn cadaver-blue waiting for commercial moviemakers to elevate gay folk from comic relief to flesh and blood, as they did for blacks decades ago with the ascension of Sidney Poitier. Only last year a fortune to rival Kuwait's annual oil revenues was collectively reaped by a homosexual Amos 'n' Andy show called The Birdcage and by Independence Day, in which Harvey Fierstein fluttered like Butterfly McQueen while Will and Jeff charged off to fight the good fight.

The next sound you hear will be the whoosh of several million bated breaths letting go. In & Out is a landmark Hollywood comedy on at least two counts: It places workaday queers at the center of its maelstrom, and it's witty--genuinely, breathlessly witty. Buoyed by Paul Rudnick's loopiest screenplay to date and a fizzy all-star ensemble led by Kevin Kline and Joan Cusack, In & Out may be one of the four or five truly funny studio comedies since Some Like It Hot.

How many Oscar-worthy scenarios are in spired by Oscar lore--in this instance, Tom Hanks's Philadelphia thank-you speech in which he outed one of his former teachers in front of tens of millions of viewers? Kline plays Howard Brackett, a popular high school English teacher whose small-town sanity and impending marriage to Cusack are exploded when a former student turned movie star (the undervalued Matt Dillon, drolly sending up his usual rebel-without-a-clue role) cops the big prize for a gay role and credits teach, adding, "And he's gay." In a flash Howard is working overtime to convince family, fiancee, students, drinking buddies, and, most important, himself, that he is all man.

No writer is better equipped to run with the ball of this farcical kickoff than Rudnick, whose scripts (including Addams Family Values, as gothic a metaphor for a young gay child's summer-camp, experience as one could hope to find) bubble over with the knowing signifiers of gay and showbiz societies. Where Jeffrey was too arch and urban for its own good, In & Out hypes the sheer weirdness of gay iconography by plunking it in the middle of the hetero heartland. Blasting Ethel Merman from your stereo and organizing Streisand film festivals may be business as usual in New York's Chelsea, but in a farm town in Indiana?

The comic centerpiece of Howard's new machismo regimen is an audio lesson on "Exploring Your Masculinity" ("Feel the heat of the disco ... do not dance ... men do not dance"), a tour de force of physical decontrol for Kline, who gives a tightly wound and--under the circumstances--creditably restrained performance. Kline and Rudnick are abetted incalculably by director Frank Oz, whose vision of Middle America initially smacks of Everymovie, USA, but soon begins to disintegrate, like Kline's character, into something John Waters might be comfortable with.

Delicious as the provincial details are, In & Out is never sharper than when it is biting the Hollywood mill that feeds it. There are enough cameos and inside jokes to carpet the Shrine Auditorium, including a dead-on Oscar show (Glenn Close glides in to announce the nominees for Best Actor, who include Paul Newman in Coot), a bimbotic supermodel (nicely turned by real-life supermodel Shalom Harlow) stopped in her tracks by a dial phone, and resident reactionary Tom Selleck as a gay entertainment reporter who plants a kiss on Kline that makes the Grant-Bergman smooch in Notorious look like a high five.

In & Out (with music by openly gay composer Marc Shaiman) flies so confidently toward its Capra-esque climax that one can't help feeling let down in the last ten minutes, when Rudnick fails to deliver a punch line worthy of all that has preceded. Still, it's hard to be churlish about a movie that provides Cusack with her finest hour since careering frantically down the hallways in Broadcast News. As the exasperated (not to say horny) bride-to-be who has kept her virtue intact for a marathon three-year engagement, she manages physical shtick worthy of the great Lucy. Sinking down into the folds of her wedding dress, she moans forlornly at the injustice of it all, as if someone had mistakenly tossed a bucket of water over the good witch instead of the bad.