Bam Bam & Celeste
Grade: B-
by Sue Katz
EDGE Boston Contributor
Tuesday Jul 24, 2007

The best thing about Bam Bam and Celeste is that besides playing the lead character, Margaret Cho plays Celeste's mother with the same chokingly hysterical wit as her stand-up impersonation of her own mom. The writing and the delivery are alone worth the cost of this DVD, which is otherwise an endearing near-miss.

The opening credits are great too, animated lettering accompanying scenes of Celeste and her best high school bud Bam Bam being bullied and ostracized by everyone else. It is DeKalb, Illinois, 1987, and Celeste is a constant target of the missiles one bully flings at her as she rides by on her bike, her orange-striped punky hair flying. At school, all the other kids sneer at her - presumably because she's freaky and Asian - and her first order of the day is to save Bam Bam from a homophobic gang-beating in the boys' room. "Someday we’re going to leave this town. Then we'll show them," she tells him as they sit around the urinals.

Fast forward to "the present day" (which puts these hip young rebels in their 30s) and nothing has changed except that the orange stripes are replaced by blue. The bully is still tripping her up on her bike and Bam Bam is bored in his small-town hairdressing salon. Off they go to New York on a disastrous road trip to make their fortunes on a TV hairstyle-off.

There are complications. The TV show's producer turns out to have a huge crush on Celeste through her website "Dictators Suck Ass." The car, luminous pink with incandescent accessories, attracts all the wrong kind of attention. At one gas station, they are saved by a beautiful older dyke, played by Jane Lynch ("Best in Show"), when the locals find the combo of the Asian punk girl and the African American gay boy just too damned provocative to put up with. In her Davy Crockett raccoon cap, the butch guardian angel moves Bam Bam and Celeste into her trailer until the car is fixed.

Bruce Daniels, aka Bam Bam, fails to carry his half of the flick. He and Cho are comic partners - he's the opening act for her road-shows. But in this, her first narrative feature, his voice is annoying and besides being camp and man-hungry, he doesn't make that much of an impression. Margaret Cho, on the other hand, is adorable from start to finish - whether as the colorful, animated Celeste or the traditional Japanese mother who just loves her new "wash and go" hairdo.

There's a lot of John Waters here, a kind of "Hairspray without the music," one viewer said. Like Waters, race and sexuality are at the heart of the tensions. I'm used to loving nearly everything Margaret Cho does. Her work and life seem full of integrity: she has been honored by the ACLU, NOW, GLAAD, Lambda Legal, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund for her unrelenting passion for justice.