Bree (Felicity Huffman) is one desperate housewife-to-be. She lives a quiet Californian life until a call from New York upsets her hormones. For biologically speaking, Bree is still Stan, one month short of a transgender operation and the young caller is the result of misplaced enthusiasm seventeen years prior. Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.

Duncan Tucker’s debut feature is a surprisingly robust work that manages to challenge both convention and expectation. Where this subject matter often tips into the earnestly tragic or the tragically camp, he brings his low-budget story a rare wit and attractive honesty. Huffman as a woman playing a man ready to be a woman ticks all the boxes with this calling-card performance. Her Bree is an uptight conservative navigating unexpected (and unwanted) parenthood - she’s got enough troubles without taking on those of a thieving hustler – yet she does. It’s a father-thing and a delicate balancing act as sullen Toby (a captivating Kevin Zegers) is unaware of his relationship to Bree, much less her gender. The cover-story of a Christian missionary holds, for a while.

Together Huffman and Zegers extract a wonderful screen chemistry which enlivens their inevitable cross-country road-trip that winds through pathos and laugh out loud comedy. Naturally, it’s not an easy journey and one peppered with incident and accident, the creative and crazy. A pit-stop at Bree’s parent’s proves near-fatal when Mom (Fionulla Flanagan) exerts her outrageous command of kith and kin. Transamerica is the best kind of tragic-comedy, one that reveals life as it is. It turns on credibility and in Huffman, Bree is utterly credible as a woman who learns to be a little less desperate.

// COLIN FRASER