Recommended

A glitter-specked gloss on David Copperfield, Neil Jordan's polymorphous picaresque retells the most turbulent period in recent Irish history through the eyes of a border-town transvestite. Patrick "Kitten" Braden (Cillian Murphy) may seem like an unreliable narrator at first (though less so than the subtitled CGI robins who establish his backstory), but his singular perspective allows Jordan (interview) to revisit the Troubles without succumbing to maudlin self-seriousness.

"Serious," as it turns out, is the dirtiest word in Kitten's vocabulary. "There's that word again—it's everywhere," she sighs as she's asked to safeguard a cache of IRA guns. "Serious, serious, serious!" But if Jordan's script (adapted from Patrick McCabe's novel) occasionally makes Kitten an icon of queenly frivolity, it's most often a trenchant, tongue-in-cheek commentary on the nature of sectarian violence.

Gliding through the escalating conflict of the 1960s and '70s, Kitten bears oblique witness to the passage of time: Soundtrack songs tick off the years, while Margaret Thatcher's election is tipped by a blurry newspaper photo Kitten's using as a makeup aid. As British detentions and IRA bombings escalate, so The Quiet Man's "Isle of Innisfree" gives way to T. Rex's "Children of the Revolution." The movie's signature shot is an exploding disco ball, whose razor shards shred the air of a London nightclub while providing the ultimate pyrotechnic spectacle.

A rebuke to border conflicts in Ireland and elsewhere, Kitten is born undivided; the first time we see him (as 10-year-old Conor McEvoy), he's already trying on his foster mother's frock. Breakfast isn't the first time Jordan has mixed transvestism and the Troubles, but there's no Crying Game "surprise" here. (Even the earlier movie's Stephen Rea, who turns up as a droopy-eyed vaudeville magician, knows Kitten's "secret" before she tells him.) The son of a village priest (Liam Neeson) and his vanished housekeeper (Eva Birthistle), Kitten is "misconceived" astride the gender line, effectively spurning the notion that boundaries are impervious and incontrovertible (not to mention causing quite a bit of what Daffy Duck would call "pronoun trouble").

Although Breakfast on Pluto is hardly apolitical, its cockeyed approach to Ireland's long-running tragedy is bound to strike some as flippant. But Kitten's refusal to be "serious" is itself a political—even spiritual—act. What she's rejecting, far more convincingly than Munich's tortured hit man, is the notion that violence can only be answered with violence, that grimness must always multiply. Instead, Kitten finds an out in the burgeoning glam rock scene, hitching a ride with a singer named Billy Hatchet (Gavin Friday) and his band, the Mohawks. Although brief, Kitten's sojourn with Hatchet and co. gives the movie its first glimpse of total, if fleeting, freedom. As Billy's band mates look on aghast from a hotel window, Kitten handily seduces the singer, and soon she's sharing the spotlight with him, donning a squaw outfit to match his war paint. Even as the audience jeers, their spotlighted duet (Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra's "Sand") offers a glimpse of a world beyond borders.

Like a mascaraed Candide, Kitten passes from one benefactor to the next. Neeson's priest gives way to the leader of a biker gang called the Border Knights, who tells a starry-eyed Kitten, "The only border that matters is the one between what's in front of you and what you've left behind." (He also provides the movie's title, a reference to a glam obscurity by Don Partridge.) Brendan Gleeson's choleric children's mascot and Ian Hart's brutal-then-tender constable also figure in the journey, as does Bryan Ferry's oily john, who offers a less benign kind of lesson. But Kitten's ultimate goal is always to find his mother, the "phantom lady" whom he knows only as the spitting image of South Pacific's Mitzi Gaynor. The quest gives the movie its shape, but it's almost a red herring; when the reunion finally does come, it's purposefully anticlimactic. The movie's real engine is the forward motion of history, looking past its open-ended finale to a future even we haven't seen yet.

Like Jordan's overlooked masterpiece The Butcher Boy (also adapted from a McCabe novel), Breakfast on Pluto takes its tone from the free-floating whimsy of its social-outcast narrator (although Breakfast is far more optimistic than its morbid predecessor). Breaking his narrative into 36 "chapters," Jordan shifts approaches without losing his balance, masterfully conveying Kitten's mercurial consciousness, her steadfast refusal to see the world from a fixed point of view. Ever-changing yet always true, Kitten is the standard-bearer of an age to come, a blithe spirit too fluid to be chained by doctrine.

Breakfast on Pluto Adapted and directed by Neil Jordan A Sony Pictures Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz Bourse