No Ordinary Man

A fascinating meta portrait of pianist Billy Tipton, a transgender man who died in 1989, as told by transmasculine actors and thinkers. Chin-Yee and Joynt’s creative coup is their framing device, in which a group of (wonderfully eloquent) transmasculine actors — mostly white but not entirely — “audition” for a role in the documentary, playing Tipton at crucial junctures of his life. Those scenes are woven together with interviews with several trans artists and writers, and footage of how the talk shows of that era handled Tipton's death and gender discovery.