Her Smell

A psychedelic description of a decadent female punk singer. Alcohol, drugs, oversized egos, squabbles as childish as insignificant ... and tutti quanti! Talent? We are still looking for it. With an omnipresent and disturbing music, the atmosphere is excessively dark, punk and degenerate. An absolute nightmare!

Small confidence: I preferred leaving the air-conditioned movie theater and joining the suffocating heat wave rather than endure this irritating film, even if Elisabeth Moss is absolutley astonishing. If I like to listen to this or that album, the more-or-less-private life of the artists disinterest me to the highest point. Therefore, in my humble opinion, this movie is a complete nuisance and almost pointless.

This movie could be compelling if you could hear the dialogue. Not sure why the background sound is louder than the dialog, but it essentially makes it hard to follow. In one scene you hear the leaking water more than anything else. I wanted to like this movie more.

Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss) is the lead singer of an once successful punk rock group. She struggles with drugs, drunkenness, instability, personal drama, and professional chaos. She's fighting with ex-husband Danny (Dan Stevens). Her mother Ania (Virginia Madsen) supports her through thick and thin. Ali van der Wolff (Gayle Rankin) and Marielle Hell (Agyness Deyn) are her long suffering bandmates. Their manager Howard Goodman (Eric Stoltz) is desperate to get her to finish her next album and recruits a new band called Akergirls. Its three members are Crassie Cassie (Cara Delevingne), Roxie Rotten (Ashley Benson), and Dottie O.Z. (Dylan Gelula).

It's an applaudable performance from Moss but the problem is that it gets rather monotonous. The constant chaos becomes the same thing over and over again until it stops being interesting. The shaman threatens to push it over into silliness. Like the band, she needs a bigger second to bounce off with narratively. Agyness Deyn is given a section which helps a lot but she may be better as the straight man lead. At one point, I assume that the movie is setting up Cara Delevingne as the second character but then she fades into the background. It's over two hours and much of it has Becky's chaos. It needs a second character to provide stable story telling.

As much I like Moss, I just did not believe her here; she came off as a spoiled, crazed child with no discernible talent, and I could not buy all the sweet, civilized, polite punk rockers in thrall.

I think the problem with this film is less with miscasting and more with the script, or lack thereof, as this could have been an incisive depiction of a musical genius, but instead is just a series of clips tied together without any real music, characters or plot.

If they had begun with the back story, seeing how she WAS and how she devolved it would have been amazing. The point in this was how like so many before her, back to the late great Janis Joplin, the industry has a way of eating the talent.

Here is a girl with a dream, and family, friends, agents, all use her up. Use her until she loses her mind and destructs, and then they all say "see, told you she was messed up" Not accounting for how she got there in the first place.

It's an all to common tale on the self destruction. Of some of the greatest talents in history.

This is the judy garland of punk rock story, but you end up not caring because the director didn't bother to start with a story. Elizabeth moss is extraordinarily crazy and uncomfortably magnetic to watch. The rest is just plain sad.