Felicity Huffman and Kevin Zegers in "Transamerica"

Having never seen “Desperate Housewives,” the popular television show for which actress Felicity Huffman won an Emmy Award, my experience of her performance in Transamerica is likely to be different from that of those of you who are already familiar with her. After about ten minutes of observing her performance as a male-to-female transsexual, I scribbled a note that it must be humiliating to be offered a role on the basis of being homely enough to pass for a man.

In other words, those of you who are already aware that Huffman is not what one would call hard on the eyes will be rather more impressed at what she and the make-up people have done to transform her. (Interestingly, the film opens here on the same day as Nanny McGhee, for which the lovely Emma Thompson subjected herself to more severe, albeit comic, uglification.)

As Bree, nee Stanley, Huffman is a plausible facsimile of a character in the late stages of gender reassignment from male to female. I believe that’s the preferred way to phrase it: the now seldom-used “sex change,” and even to some degree “transsexual,” don’t give faith to the feelings of someone like Bree that she is not changing her gender but rather freeing it from some biological confusion.

Transamerica opens a week before Bree is scheduled for her final surgery. (We may as well use the female pronoun, even if for most of the film it isn’t entirely accurate.) Living alone in Los Angeles, she is in “deep stealth”; no one but her therapist (Elizabeth Peña) knows that Bree is anything other than a modest, conservative thirtysomething woman who waits tables at a Mexican restaurant.

Bree’s determination to control her history hits a snag when she learns that she has a son, the result of a college encounter that apparently is the entirety of her sexual experience. Her therapist refuses to approve her surgery until she deals with this issue, and so Bree flies to New York to bail Toby (Kevin Zegers) out of jail.

The script contrives (a bit clumsily, but you can overlook that) to put the two on a cross-country auto trip on which, in the manner of road movies past and future, their characters are brought out by friction, both with each other and with an assortment of colorful characters they meet on the way. Unwilling to deal too directly with the situation, Bree passes herself off as a church worker assigned to work with difficult teens. That certainly describes Toby: a runaway from an abusive home, he had been hustling tricks and dealing drugs in Manhattan, and wants to get to LA so that he can work in the porn industry and meet his real father, whom he believes to be wealthy and successful.

Transamerica walks a thin line between examining an unusual character in order to humanize her and giving us a freak show. If we’re honest, we have to admit that exploitation is what draws us to a story like this in the first place. Arguably the cause of getting us to accept people like Bree would be best served by showing her as a perfectly well-adjusted person who is indistinguishable from a woman who did not have to struggle with her physical makeup—but who would go see that movie?

Aside from giving Huffman a chance to deconstruct femininity, Transamerica doesn’t do anything very risky. Bree doesn’t test the tolerance of a mainstream audience in any way: she seems to have no sexuality, active or repressed, that we can see, and apparently wants nothing else out of life than to stay in her bungalow and not be bothered by anyone. It’s almost as if writer-director Duncan Tucker is trying to argue for her gender quest on the grounds that she’s so inoffensive in every other way, why not give her this? Our encounter with her middle-class family in suburban Arizona has a similar effect; anyone who came from this tacky milieu deserves any escape route she can find.

Made on a low budget and looking it, Transamerica is entertaining enough; the road plot keeps the locations shifting, and there are new characters every reel or so to liven it up. You can take your mom to see it, even grandma, and they probably won’t be offended by any of it. But there’s nothing especially ground-breaking or challenging about it.