Allison Berg's "Time Warp" captures something rarely seen in documentaries about LGBTQ theater. The film follows a scrappy Rocky Horror Picture Show tribute production in Wyoming as young queer performers navigate both artistic ambition and small-town political pushback. City council members attempt censorship, but the troupe presses forward with their drag-inflected staging anyway.
Berg frames this story with the sensibility of a Christopher Guest mockumentary, but the earnestness feels authentic rather than ironic. These aren't caricatures. They're real kids in a conservative pocket of America, drawn together by Frank N. Furter and the countercultural promise of Rocky Horror itself. The doc captures rehearsals, feuds, costume crises, and the genuine stakes of mounting taboo entertainment in a community that actively resists it.
What makes "Time Warp" work is its refusal to condescend. Berg could have positioned this as tragedy or triumph, oppression or resilience. Instead, she lets the performers breathe. The comedy emerges naturally from the collision between their enthusiasm and their environment. Small-town council meetings about whether a drag show damages local decency standards play out with unintentional absurdity. Meanwhile, the kids just want to perform.
Rocky Horror holds particular power here. The film isn't just about theater or even LGBTQ identity. It's about a generation inheriting a legacy of queer defiance and making it their own in a place where that legacy arrives late, if at all. For audiences in progressive metros, Wyoming drag might feel exotic. For the subjects themselves, it's home. They're not staging this for outsiders. They're doing it because something in the music and the midnight-movie mythology speaks to who they are.
Berg's documentary premiered at Outfest, the Los Angeles LGBTQ film festival,