Transamerica.

Transamerica * Written and directed by Duncan Tucker * Starring Felicity Huffman, Kevin Zegers, Elizabeth Pena, Graham Greene * Weinstein Co.

Felicity Huffman may well balance off her mantle come March 5 with an Oscar to complement the Emmy she scored for Desperate Housewives in September. Like Charlize Theron in Monster, Huffman has undergone a makeup-driven physical transformation that's made seamless by the depth and power of her emotional transformation. Transgender woman Bree--poor, totally alone, and working at demeaning jobs to save the money for her upcoming gender-reassignment surgery--is about as far from Wisteria Lane's Lynette Scavo as a woman can get. Yet Huffman allows not a moment of doubt, not an ounce of pity. You may not recognize Huffman beneath the cheesy wig, angular features, and Kmart clothes, but you'll recognize immediately that Dree is a struggling, sweet, slightly prickly male-to-female transperson in search of herself.

To Bree's surprise, she's also in search of a 17-year-old son she didn't know she'd fathered. Toby (Kevin Zegers), an Abercrombie-cute street hustler, is soon found, and in typically illogical road-movie fashion, the mismatched pair wind up driving across America in a broken-down Chevy--without Dree having come out to Toby, of course. Rest-stop romance, roadside skinnydipping, a trans potluck, and painful family reunions (with Toby's adoptive father and Bree's dysfunctional parents) follow. The movie meanders with its main characters, and Toby remains a fuzzy bundle of neuroses: Is he bi? Sociopathic? Dim? It's never quite clear.

But Bree is as sharp and as oddly beautiful as a flowering cactus, the triumphant result of writer-director Duncan Tuckers dedicated consultation with trans advisers. Even in admirable docs, trans people are often defined by their differences from "us." Dree is defined by her shared humanity: hoping, loving, moving forward even when it hurts like hell.