Klaus and effect: avant-garde performer Klaus Nomi lives again in director Andrew Horn's documentary The Nomi Song.

He has been dead for over 20 years, but Klaus Nomi may turn out to be the hottest gay recording artist of 2005, thanks to a new documentary about his brief but glorious performance career. The Nomi Song, directed by Berlin-based American filmmaker Andrew Horn, recounts the five years in which German-born pastry chef Klaus Sperber invented his Nomi persona--the name was an anagram of the popular science fiction magazine Omni--and became a cult favorite in the United States, Europe, and Japan before succumbing to AIDS in 1983 during the first swell of the epidemic.

Diva, alien, cartoon, Kabuki robot--all descriptors for a man whose trained countertenor was so Callas-like that naive viewers often thought he was lip-synching. With painted Cabaret lips, Ed Grimley topknot, Star Trek garb, and herky-jerky arm gestures, Nomi synthesized Weimar cabaret, '60s pop (notably Lou Christie's "Lightning Strikes," the remake for which he's probably most remembered), '80s new wave rock, and classic German opera into a spooky, compelling, oh-so-gay melange.

"Being gay was not overtly part of his act, although it clearly came from a gay sensibility," says Horn, whose previous films include East Side Story, a documentary about Communist musicals. "He never appeared in drag, for instance, but then he had his own very specific personal drag."

Horn met Nomi in New York City's East Village in the late 1970s while both were working on Charles Ludlam's outrageous Wagner parody, Der Ring Gott Farblonjet. "Klaus replaced one of the performers--a woman who was a real opera singer--and seemed to literally just appear out of nowhere," says Horn. "Then I saw him at the New Wave Vaudeville show in November of 1978 [Nomi performed an aria from Saint-Saens's Samson et Dalila], and I was as knocked out as everyone else."

Horn found footage of that and other Nomi shows, interviewed Nomi friends such as artist Kenny Scharf and out musician Kristian Hoffman (who wrote much of Nomi's original material), and discovered home movies and Nomi interviews. The documentary also includes footage of the performer backing David Bowie on Saturday Night Live in 1979, a career boost that never quite panned out.

And what if Nomi had lived--what would he be doing today? "My personal theory is that [avant-garde theatrical impresario] Robert Wilson would have gotten his hooks in him," says Horn. Nomi's other cohorts think he might have gone into cabaret, serious opera, or ended up in Vegas in his own Siegfried and Roy-style theater.

The great thing about Nomi, though, as this engaging film shows, is that during his brief time in the spotlight he was able to do it all--and all at once.

Kort is author of Dinah! Three Decades of Sex, Golf, & Rock 'n' Roll and senior editor at Ms. magazine.