BRAZILIAN FILM HAS staked a strong international presence in the last year, thanks to the bullet-speed travels of Fernando Meirelles's City of God, the troubling revision of real-life teledrama in Felipe Lacerda and José Padilha's Bus 174, and the Toronto International Film Festival's recent announcement that Brazil will be the focus of its annual National Cinema program this fall. Eclipsed by the flashy poverty of Meirelles's gangsta saga at the Cannes Film Festival last year, Karïm Ainouz's debut feature, Madame Satã – a portrait of street legend João Francisco dos Santos – is a pricklier, evasive creature; it's just as explosive, albeit on a smaller scale. Flaws and all, Madame Satã's mere existence exposes the bigotry of contemporary U.S. film; you'd have to look back to Paris Is Burning for a commercially released domestic movie with a similar theme and subject. (Juwanna Mann? I don't think so.)

Moreover, Jennie Livingston's 1990 through-the-looking-glass treatment of drag balls is a documentary; in contrast, Ainouz has the audacity to grant something different than ethnography: the fictive film-star treatment that is its Gay Shame-icon protagonist's dream. Madame Satã contains a scene from the 1935 Josephine Baker film Princess Tam Tam in which Baker throws off her pumps and they hit a stiff-looking old white man in the face; Ainouz is aiming for a similar effect. Hustler, murderer, and queen are just three of the labels alternately modeled and discarded by dos Santos, known simply as João (Lázaro Ramos) in the film.

Born 12 years after slavery was "officially" outlawed in Brazil, dos Santos was swapped for a mare by his mother when he was seven. Thus began an outlaw's journey – a 76-year odyssey punctuated by 27 years of prison time – that would ultimately be celebrated during the '70s in the pages of countercultural journals such as Pasquim. (A myth-laden memoir, ghostwritten by Sylvan Paezzo, was published in 1972.) Just as Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn inspired Lou Reed to pen "Walk on the Wild Side," Madame Satã was treated to a song ("Mulato Bamba") by composer Noel Rosa.

Capable of sucking the ring off a trick's finger, Madame Satã's João alternates between joy and rage. Ramos's outsize acting involves copious displays of capoeira, and the resulting performance translates emotion into physicality: even in a moment of mute grief, the bones and muscles of his face strain showily. At home João plays the father role in a cramped apartment with a flighty francesa named Laurita (Marcelia Cartaxo, in a role diametrically opposed to her portrayal of the pitiful Macabea in Suzana Amaral's adaptation of Clarice Lispector's incomparably droll Hour of the Star), Laurita's infant child, and housewife Tabu (Flavio Bauraqui, who cradles his own head as if he were also a baby). It's almost always nighttime in Madame Satã, street noise is ever present, and songs spill from one scene and room into another.

Attuned to ferocious mood and sweaty, grimy atmosphere, Walter Carvalho's camera work virtually becomes a third partner in sex and dance scenes, and it finds magic where and when it can: refracted mirror images, and shots in which the beads of sweat or ocean water on João's skin are more jewellike than any of his stolen costume gems. But this tactic misfires during João's stage shows: perhaps trying to approximate the orgasmic excitement he feels, the camera rarely steps back to capture him in his entirety. The restless close-ups of Carvalho's camera convey entrapment and brief moments of freedom, but they can also result in a lack of continuity that doesn't do any favors for the film's disorientingly compressed time frame.

The title of James N. Green's study of male homosexuality in Brazil, Beyond Carnival, refutes stereotypical associations of Brazilian gay life with revelry. Likewise, Ainouz's film could be titled Before Carnival. Set in the bohemian Lapa district of Rio de Janeiro in 1932, it briefly leapfrogs 10 years in the closing credits, stopping with a blurry, distanced vision of João's cathartic Carnival transformation into Madame Satã. There are contradictions between Green's account of Satã and Ainouz's film: Beyond Carnival attributes Madame Satã's nickname to a cop's (!) remark, while Ainouz attributes it to dos Santos. Perhaps more crucially, Green describes Satã as a passive bicha, but in the film João aggressively tops his "Indian prince," Renathino (Felippe Marques). Regardless, the myth-making João/Satã confounded rules of masculinity and femininity.