MADAME SATA []

Disappointing drag queen biopic from Brazil. In Portuguese with English subtitles. Running time: 105 minutes. Not rated (explicit sexual content). At the Film Forum, Houston Street west of Sixth Avenue.

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SEVERAL relatively explicit scenes of male-male sexual activity are likely to win Karim Ainouz’ “Madame Sata” a niche audience willing to overlook its flaws.

Nevertheless, this biopic of Joao Francisco de Santos – a legendary Brazilian drag performer, street fighter, thief and murderer – is one of those films that takes up a potentially fascinating subject only to fumble it.

This is particularly disappointing given that “Madame Sata” (dos Santos’ stage name) boasts photography by Walter Carvalho (“Central Station”), some very fine performances (in particular by Lazaro Ramos as dos Santos), and a compelling ’30s setting in the smoky clubs and broken-down streets of Rio’s bohemian Lapa district.

You meet dos Santos when he’s working as a dresser for a cabaret singer whose biggest number is the Josephine Baker hit “Nuit d’Alger” and whom he idolizes and imitates.

When he’s not at the cabaret he’s turning tricks, fighting (he’s an expert at the martial art of capoeira) or running the household he shares with Laurita (Marcelia Cartiaxo) the prostitute whose little daughter he’s adopted, and Taboo (Flavio Bauraui), an effeminate fellow-hustler and accomplice in crime.

His is an exotic but real-seeming world (shot by Carvalho in a way that stresses darkness and claustrophobia) of turbulent sexual, racial and class politics.

Unfortunately, the plot is shapeless and disorganized: Ainouz’s script doesn’t really tell a story – it merely presents a series of anecdotes from dos Santos’ life before he achieved stardom – a stardom with which the audience is assumed to be familiar.

And so you walk out with that vaguely cheated feeling that you’ve seen something incomplete or unfinished.