A free society accommodates a gamut of misfits. In a free society, one does not compete with everyone else; one competes within the domain of chosen peers.
Pre-Code Hollywood of the 1920s and early 1930s was free: free from Broadway, free from the stifling norms of the East Coast, free to innovate. Then it fell victim to its own success. It paid to conform to the prevailing prejudice in order to retain and grow the audience that Hollywood initially won through rebellious innovation. People continued to be free, but often on the fringes, lacking the comforts furnished by a truly free society.
The movie's protagonist is a society. The character arc is not that of an individual but that of a society, which evolves as it passes through eras, some of its own making. The arc is flat. It reveals lessons. These lessons are not acted upon by—and probably are not even revealed to—the society itself, though, and are ever more poignant for it.
