I Am Divine

Harris Glenn Milstead grew up in Baltimore. He was beaten at school, mocked for his weight, and his family did not know what to do. One of the neighbourhood boys was John Waters. Waters gave him a name: Divine. They started making films together. Divine played women but did not resemble the drag tradition; he imitated nobody and did not try to look beautiful. The films caused scandal. Pink Flamingos made a cult. Hairspray opened onto the mainstream. Then a male part in a television series was offered. Divine had been waiting for that. Jeffrey Schwarz directs. John Waters, Ricki Lake and people around Divine speak in the documentary. It is an American production. Divine was born in 1945 and died in 1988; his death came shortly after Hairspray's release. The documentary takes Divine not as a stage persona but as the man carrying that persona, and makes the distance between the two its subject. The narrative holds long on his relations with his family; he and his mother did not see each other for years, and that section is the heaviest in it. The archive material is dense; there is a great deal from the early films and from home recordings. The documentary also covers his singing period and the nightclub work. The narrative stands between admiration and distance and gives the difficult sides of the person too. Its limit is method; the structure is plainly chronological, there are many talking heads, and it makes no formal claim. Who it is for: viewers who like John Waters's cinema, cult production and portrait documentary. Who it is not for: the structure is conventional, the subject narrow, and the ending sad.