Five Years On: What The Sound of Identity Taught Me

A Pride Month reflection from the director’s chair.

Five years ago this month, The Sound of Identity premiered on STARZ.

I have been thinking about that release a lot lately. Not because of the milestone itself, though five years is a long time in this business. I have been thinking about it because the questions the film asked in 2021 are not the questions I would have predicted we would still be asking in 2026. If anything, the conversation has gotten louder. The stakes have gotten higher. And the woman at the center of our film, Lucia Lucas, still stands as one of the clearest answers I know to a question many people are once again afraid to even ask out loud.

The question is simple. Can a trans artist be allowed to do the work?

Lucia answered it in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in front of a live audience, in a 400 year old art form, with the kind of baritone voice that does not ask permission. We just happened to have the cameras rolling.

The film I almost didn’t make

I have written before about the fact that I turned this film down three times. I am a Southern kid from Bellville, Georgia, population 123. I grew up on country roads, not in opera houses. When Russ Kirkpatrick and Andy Kinslow first called me, I did not believe I was the right person to direct this. I told them so. Repeatedly.

What changed my mind was a phone call with Lucia.

Once I talked to her, the logline an audience would see on paper, the first transgender woman to perform a leading male role at a major American opera, stopped being the movie I wanted to make. That logline is a headline. Lucia is a person. The film I wanted to make was about her artistry, her reconciliation with the child she used to be and the woman she had become, her relationship with her mentor Tobias Picker, and the moment in any artist’s career when everything could fall apart or come together. Her being trans is part of the story. It is not the whole story. It is not even the center of it. Her voice is the center.

That instinct, more than any other single choice, is what I think the film got right. Slate’s review put it better than I could. The reviewer noted that the film is about Lucas’s life, but isn’t really a biographical portrait, and that it’s a movie about art, principally what art can demand of those who make it, what art can tell us about life itself, with the movie upending expectations by declining to offer a coming out story.

That was the assignment. Declining to offer the coming out story. Trusting the audience to meet Lucia as an artist first.

What the critics saw

I do not usually look back at reviews. You make the film, you release it, you move on to the next one. But for this anniversary I went back through the press archive on my site, and a few things struck me five years later.

Pipeline Artists called it a profoundly important documentary, and the most life-altering film experience the interviewer had had in years. The Washington Blade described it as a layered, up-close profile of a trans pioneer forging new pathways to acceptance within the rarified environment of an insular professional community where trans inclusion has been far from the norm. Queerty wrote that the film plays like a reminder to viewers everywhere that what an actor does on stage or screen has nothing to do with her real life.

The one I keep returning to is from Elements of Madness. The reviewer described The Sound of Identity as the rare documentary which evolves as it goes, taking the audience on a journey of the soul, uncovered piece by piece, moment by moment, conversation by conversation.

That sentence is the film. That is what I was reaching for in the edit. A slow uncovering, not a thesis statement.

The Advocate ran a piece around release that captured the throughline I most hoped audiences would walk away with. The interview framed the message of the film as bigger than Lucas: you can be trans and still live the life of your dreams, these things are not mutually exclusive, and while we still have a long way to go to reach full LGBTQ+ equality, especially for the trans community, Lucas is an example of what’s possible.

I want to sit with that sentence for a moment. You can be trans and still live the life of your dreams. These things are not mutually exclusive.

That should not be a radical statement. In 2026, it is.

The stage that mattered

The decision that shaped everything about how this film looks came early, and I want to share it because it is the kind of craft choice that does not announce itself but does almost all of the work.

I knew Lucia always had to be interviewed on a stage. Every single interview. Three principal interviews, three stages, each one bigger than the last. The smallest stage for act one. A middle stage for act two. The biggest stage for act three. Once we left a stage, we never returned to it.

The physical space had to mirror her internal and external growth as an artist. It also had to mirror something harder to name, which is the public stage of judgment that every otherized person is forced to stand upon whether they asked for it or not. Trans people in this country are being forced onto that stage right now in ways most of us cannot imagine. Lucia stepped onto hers and sang Mozart.

Film Inquiry put their finger on something about the directing approach I am still proud of. The reviewer noted on a third viewing an artist with a compassionate and intelligent vision that is both disciplined and inquisitive, and that the film bears the hallmarks of an instinctual and intuitive director who knows when to lean into elements that might seem superfluous and build on a contextual subterfuge that reinforces the film.

That review still teaches me. The compliment I value most as a director is disciplined. Restraint is a choice. Letting Lucia carry her own scenes was a choice. Cutting around the conventional beats of a trans narrative and into the rehearsal room, the costume fitting, the quiet moments with Tobias, was a choice.

The Independent Critic, in their original review, called it the film that will, or at least should, make Kicklighter the household name he always should have been. I am still working on the household name part. But I appreciated the faith.

Tulsa, in particular

I want to say something about Tulsa, because I think people who have not seen the film sometimes assume the location was incidental. It was not.

Tulsa Opera, under Tobias Picker, made the decision to cast Lucia. That decision happened in a state that does not usually appear in the conversation about trans representation. The World from Public Radio International, covering the run-up to the performance, wrote that the New York Times sent a reporter, the Metropolitan Opera sent a casting representative, Lucas had a documentary crew following her around, and her dad, whom she hadn’t seen for a decade, flew in specially for the occasion.

Think about that crew at the opera house. A New York Times reporter. The Met. A documentary team from Los Angeles. A father reuniting with his daughter after ten years. All of them in Tulsa, because Tulsa is where the work was happening.

This is the part of the story I am most protective of. The geography. The assumption that progress only happens in the cities we are told progress happens in, and that everywhere else is a place to be escaped from, is wrong. I know that because I grew up in a town of 123 people in South Georgia, and the artists and thinkers I met there were every bit as serious as the ones I have met in Los Angeles. Lucia made history in Oklahoma. That detail is the film’s quiet thesis about America.

Five years later

When Shout! Studios picked up the film, Deadline reported that Shout! Studios secured all North American distribution rights for the documentary which includes theatrical, digital, VOD, broadcast, and home entertainment for cross-platform releases, with Shout! Studios set to take the movie across all major entertainment platforms. They have kept that promise. The film has lived a long life because of them, and because of the audiences who keep finding it.

I do not know what the next five years hold for the trans community in this country. I do know what I hope. I hope more young trans people get to see Lucia on a stage. I hope more rural opera companies, regional theaters, and small markets cast bravely. I hope more directors who feel like outsiders to a story say yes to it anyway, because the outsider’s question is sometimes the question the inside cannot ask.

And I hope, in another five years, this film still feels both timely and a little dated, because we have moved past the moment where its premise was considered radical at all.

In the meantime, if you have not seen it, or if you watched it once back in 2021 and want to revisit, The Sound of Identity is streaming free on Prime Video and YouTube TV right now. No rental, no purchase. Just the film, the way we made it.

Happy Pride.

— James