Synopsis
For decades, the life of American Jazz musician Billy Tipton was framed as the story of an ambitious woman passing as a man in pursuit of a music career. In No Ordinary Man, Tipton’s story is re-imagined and performed by trans artists as they collectively paint a portrait of an unlikely hero. Together, the filmmakers join Tipton’s son Billy Jr. to reckon with a complicated and contested legacy: how do you tell the story of someone who was hiding in plain sight yet desperate to be seen?
A word from Tënk
It’s only fitting that a film about trans experiences doesn’t easily fit into a box. No Ordinary Man, directed by Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt, breaks ground for queer storytelling. This self-reflexive film corrects the narrative about jazz musician Billy Tipton. The conventional—and incorrect—account of Tipton’s biography says that he was a woman who "passed" as a man while playing in nightclubs in the 1940s and 1950s. However, the film revises Tipton’s tale by inviting a chorus of transgender men to embody his story and reflect his bravery through contemporary voices. He was a man, and this film celebrates the musician as such.
There are no videos of Tipton himself, so Chin-Yee and Joynt let the speakers interpret scripted scenarios that explore his biography while actors "audition" to play him in a drama. These soul-baring monologues appear as direct address confessionals, but also as behind-the-scenes vérité as the filmmakers foreground the mechanics of the audition process. The hybrid nature riffs on the performative aspects of gender identity and expression. Much like Joynt’s subsequent feature Framing Agnes, which cast trans actors in dramatic readings of 1960 UCLA interview transcripts, No Ordinary Man lets shared histories of transpeople collide to illustrate how there is no singular account for transgender experiences. No Ordinary Man brilliantly straightens out Tipton’s story by queering it.
Pat Mullen
Publisher, POV Magazine
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