Her Smell

In marrying grunge visionary Kurt Cobain, 90s Riot Grrrl Courtney Love was often seen as an interloper or an interferer, castigated, in that sweeping sort of way, as a witch, of sorts, like she cast a spell on her husband, which was the only way she could have landed him in the first place. It’s a familiar stereotype of famed rockers partners, like Yoko Ono, who blatantly turned the screw with the song “Yes, I’m A Witch.” Stevie Nicks, meanwhile, built her whole extraordinary career off subverting the witch trope. Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss), something of a Courtney Love analogue, driving force behind a fictional influential alt rock band called Something She in Alex Ross Perry’s stupendous “Her Smell” is not so much a witch, despite briefly nibbling on the necks of a few peers and calling them “my witches”, as cast under a spell of celebrity. Perry conjures this supernatural sensation in league with sound designer Ryan Price straight away in the opening scene where a night-omnipresent low cacophony on the soundtrack suggests crowd noise until it gradually dawns on you that it’s something else, a pervasive kind of murmur, suggestive of the sound design on David Fincher’s “Seven”, like a creeping sonic stink you can’t get rid of, and in the context of some far-out religious ceremony in which Becky is half-partaking and her goth vibes and her trippy incantations emit the sense of her own negative energy. Indeed, when she leaves the room, this sound noticeably stops; when she returns, so does the rumble.

This sequence sets the film’s tone, a series of five oft-confrontational, dialogue-driven set pieces giving us a front row seat to Becky’s mental and emotional unraveling, as if we are flies on the wall at Nellcôte for the recording of “Exile on Main St.”, stalking through green rooms and recording studios like every person she encounters is another bridge to be instantly doused with gasoline. She flits about accosting her bandmates, her ex-husband and his fiancé, treating her own daughter less like the infant she is than some inhuman rag doll, and exasperating her record label impresario Howard, played brilliantly by Eric Stoltz with simultaneous cool patience and sneaking stress, demonstrating the toll dealing with rock stars takes, where every cigarette he smokes is not a prop but a lifeline. And Perry’s camera, jittery and up close, places us squarely not only in Becky’s headspace but all those stressed-out souls in her orbit, occasional cuts to long shots, which typically recount someone other than Becky, emitting the air of momentous relief.

If it is deliberately repetitive, Moss’s incendiary performance is not, playing the role so high on her character’s supply that she is virtually suspended in the orbit of her own vehement ego, not merely intoning that these mere mortals can’t keep up with her but living it out in the jarring speed of her line delivery and surprising dexterity of wit born out in the script’s dialogue despite her obvious chemical dependency. And for as bracing as the material is there is a surprising rush of joy coursing through the performance, with Moss playing Becky like she’s getting a kick out of swan diving into the gutter, frequently proffering an observation or dry joke so cutting and comical that you will just suddenly feel joy or laughter welling up inside in spite of all the ick you were just feeling. These witty eruptions are sudden windows into what must have made Becky a significant artist and beloved bandmate, just as the film’s concert prologue gives a glimpse of the band’s sonic glory.

That’s all they are though, glimpses, as Perry pointedly forgoes a rise and fall narrative, airdropping us directly into the fall, which is partially provocative but more in the service of truly thrusting notions of redemption under the microscope. When the movie finally cuts away from the harsh lighting of rock clubs and music studios for the airy, earthy tones of Becky’s home, where she sits in pajama pants and a sweater eventually visited by her ex-husband and now adolescent daughter, she might be working toward clemency, but the scene’s sensation is still isolating, underscored by the photography’s chilly hues. By only showing us at her worst, Perry is challenging us to still hope for the best while demonstrating the inherent difficulty of that challenge. That comes through further in the film’s fifth and final stanza, a Something She reunion, in which the claustrophobia and sinister sound design return. Perry mines incredible suspense from the recurring idea of Becky vanishing before shows, the entire sequence resting on a knife’s edge, seemingly primed for an explosion only to unexpectedly bloom into exorcism.

Listen Up Philip

It's really quite astounding that after nearly two hours in his relentlessly off-putting company we are not entirely put off by the insanely appropriately named Philip Lewis Friedman. Wait. That's the wrong lede. Apologies. Let me try this again. It's really quite astounding that after nearly two hours in the relentlessly off-putting company of its title character we are not entirely put off by "Listen Up Philip." Because we are most decidedly put off by the insanely appropriately named Philip Lewis Friedman himself, a Manhattan-based author whose Category 5 Hurricane of venom initially seems designed to regale us with just another philosophically violent anti-fable of so-called Tortured Genius. In the end, though, genius, real or imagined, is beside the point. This film isn't about a genius, it's about a jackass. A pair of them, in fact, and one noble soul who does not redeem the jackasses but gives reason for an otherwise exhausted audience to at last rejoice in the decency of humanity.

Philip's instinct isn't to threaten when attacked, and it isn't even to threaten in case of being attacked - no, it's just to threaten. No, not even threaten. Threaten would suggest a reason to be scared of Philip and no one's scared of him, they're only tired. His instinct is to bloviate, and bloviate immediately upon entrance into any given room. He pin-pricks everyone else in order to prop himself up. He is narcissistic, yes, obviously, but that doesn't go far enough. He's almost a vessel for a modern-day re-telling of the Narkissos Myth. That Philip does not fall in love with his own reflection in the Central Park Pond and ultimately drown is probably only because that end would actually bring audience members to applause, and director/writer Alex Ross Perry is more intent to induce lameazoid laments of "But I just didn't care about this person" so he can laugh at them.

The off-putting protagonist is played by Jason Schwartzman, an actor who has never possessed the need to be "liked". Even in the "Big Eyes" trailer, the few seconds he appears on screen come with his patented disenchanted annunciation and perpetually miffed expression. He's not trying to sell you on this movie because he'd rather you just went the hell away. It's a litmus test of disdain. We are taught to demonstrate empathy, even toward hipster brutes, but "Listen Up Philip" strips us of all empathetic desire. We are left with disdain and, as such, the film cleverly, frighteningly puts us directly in the headspace of our protagonist by making us feel toward him the way he feels toward everyone else.

His new novel is on the verge of being slammed by The New York Times, essentially a death knell, and so he retreats, taking up the invitation of novelist giant Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce) to come up to his country estate to write. "You'll need a country retreat if you want to get anything done," Ike explains. Except nothing much seems to get done at the country retreat except drinking and self-loathing. The manner in which these two feed each other's worst impulses threatens to turn "Listen Up Philip" into a full-blown literary horror movie. A sequence when Ike brings two women home and then banishes them when he becomes bored is excruciating. You half expect Ike's daughter (Krysten Ritter) who requisitely shows up to try and cut these two bloviators down a peg to lose her mind and pick up an axe as if Shelley Duvall turned the tables on Jack.

So what prevents Philip Lewis Friedman's solipsism from symbolically strangling us? It is Perry's majestical decision to take a story of a selfish creative monster, one that would clearly lend itself to a solitary viewpoint that its main character would refuse to relinquish, and occasionally hand the narrative off instead to his persecuted significant other, Ashley Kane (Elisabeth Moss), an artist herself whose abilities her boyfriend ignores because, well, how many damn adjectives can I employ to describe his cavernous self-interest? Suddenly, however, just when it seems Philip might be pushing us too turn off the Blu Ray player or walk out of the theater, the point-of-view switches to Ashley, and rather than being forced to simply wallow on the sidelines and react to the blithering idiot of her life, she re-asserts her individuality and re-claims her own happiness.

Then world is chock full of Philip Lewis Friedmans, sapping our sanity, unwittingly assailing our happiness, beating us down 'til all that remains is a carcass of emotion. Hell, he might as well be a more verbally dexterous metaphor for Twitter. And when Ashley casts him off into the musky dungeon of his own dialogue, we don't cheer the demise to which he doesn't even seem to grasp he's resigned, we cheer her self-recognition.