By Neil Jordan's count, Breakfast on Pluto (review) is his fourth film about "the intersection of violence and Irish life," following The Crying Game, Michael Collins and Angel (released here as Danny Boy). But Breakfast's more pertinent antecedent is Jordan's 1997 The Butcher Boy, and not just because both are adapted from Patrick McCabe novels. Like Butcher Boy, Breakfast's volatile tone is dictated by its social-outcast narrator, though Breakfast's transvestite hero(ine) calls for a more whimsical approach than Butcher Boy's juvenile sociopath. Hitting maturity just as the sectarian violence of the 1970s reaches its peak, Patrick "Kitten" Braden decries the madness around him in no uncertain terms. "Why is everyone so serious?"

On the phone from his Dublin office, Jordan worries that American audiences might misconstrue Kitten's outburst, as a few early reviewers already have. "That word 'serious' is misunderstood," he says. "It's not that he wants life to be frivolous. The word 'serious' is constantly used by violent people to remind people whose face they're about to bash in that they're about to do it. That's the sense in which he means it."

A movie whose protagonist, in one fantasy sequence, dons a latex body suit and disarms British troops with weaponized perfume spray might fairly be accused of trivializing Ireland's bloody past, but it's what Kitten calls "the kind of laughter that disguises tears." "It's a particularly Irish thing," Jordan says, "where you're laughing one moment and crying the next." Breakfast hardly skimps on the tragedy—one of Kitten's childhood friends is killed by a car bomb, and another is executed by his IRA comrades—but Jordan goes light on the climate-of-fear stuff, of which Irish viewers need only a subtle reminder. In the U.S., Jordan says, "the emotional background is perhaps not obviously understood. So they see comedic elements and perhaps don't respond emotionally to the rather upsetting element of what happens."

Still, the chapterized variation of McCabe's novel was what drew Jordan in, offering a way to express the "extraordinary schizophrenia" of 1970s Dublin. "It was a very, very strange time in Ireland," Jordan recalls. "The country was just becoming part of the modern world, and this conflict erupted. It was dragged into the past just as it was heading into the future." In the movie, as in his memories, bombing campaigns and police brutality share space with glitter rock and drug culture, with Kitten drifting freely between both worlds.

For Jordan, Kitten's very existence is a challenge to the country's age-old conflicts. "The reason he chose this persona is because, in the world he comes from, everything is determined in terms of identity. The conflict was about whether you're Catholic or Protestant—once you have that stamp on you, you never lose it. That's why A shot B and B shot C." Kitten, indefinable by nature, represents a world without borders—a world in which Jordan, much as he might desire it, finds his own place uncertain. With the IRA scrapping its weapons, a resolution to the conflict seems within reach, but if a new Ireland is being born, Jordan says he's "not sure I'm a part of it." These days, he says, "everybody talks about money. It's become a very wealthy place—a little like Norway. You see something struggling to emerge, but what's emerging is a very, very reactionary form of liberal capitalism. A lot of people don't feel a part of it."

"His main battle is really to preserve himself as he is," says Jordan, who uses masculine and feminine pronouns interchangeably when discussing his central character. "Everybody's trying to turn him into what he's not, but I love the affirmation of the guy, the way he didn't question any of those elements of his sexuality." More profoundly, Kitten is characterized by her fundamental decency. "I always thought of the character as good, in the moral sense—as representing an infectious kind of goodness," Jordan explains. "He's someone who transforms different situations by his refusal to cross a moral line." Although the differences between them are obvious, it's clear Jordan identifies deeply with Kitten's principled resistance to change, as well as her immediate circumstances. "I put everything I remembered into the character," he says. "I did a lot of pivotal things the character did, only I wasn't a rent boy or a transvestite."