"TransAmerica" is a road movie with a twist, a kind of psycho-sexual picaresque about sexuality and gender identity in the early twenty-first century United States.

I must admit I was a bit skeptical of the idea of a female playing a transsexual woman, particularly Felicity Huffman, who I think is a very good actor, but when I heard she was playing the lead role, I wondered if they picked her because of the "Desperate Housewives" fame -- and oddly enough, her character in the film is named 'Bree' (though not surnamed 'Vandekamp'), even though of course she plays Lynette in "Housewives".

But I was really impressed by this film, written and directed by Duncan Tucker. Huffman is really convincing (if that's the right word here) as a male-to-female transsexual (MTF TS). My only reservation is that the film is a little too 'medical model of transsexuality' for me -- with an implicit GID (Gender Identity Disorder) pathologizing of the "I feel like a woman trapped in a man's body" kind. Having said that, "TransAmerica" is, in my view, one of the best feature films I've seen with a transgender theme; perhaps not quite as powerful as "Boys Don't Cry", but unlike that film, the central character is not a victim, but rather an ordinary transgendered woman feeling her way toward self-empowerment.