Her Smell review: Elisabeth Moss is messy and ugly in all the right ways

Her Smell, the latest angry girl rocker film, holds nothing back in its depiction of a dysfunctional lead singer trying to regain her creative mojo.

There’s an ineffable quality to Her Smell, one that makes you feel somehow sticky and slightly hungover, even when you’re watching it in a (reasonably) clean movie theater, stone cold sober. Of the angry girl musician films that have been hitting the market over the past six months or so, Her Smell feels like the one most willing to get really down and dirty. It’s divisive and risky and it doesn’t always work, but more than anything it has teeth.

We meet Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss) as the young, vibrant lead singer of the ’90s punk band Something She — they’re on the cusp of success and their energy is electric. Elisabeth Moss imbues her with an elusive, enthralling quality that all the legendary rock stars seem to have that draws you in almost in spite of yourself. You may not like her, but you also can’t tear your eyes away from her. This is a young Becky Something, her and her band full of endless potential.

This is not our Becky Something.

Ours is a deeply unstable, mercurial siren of a lead singer who has alienated everyone in her life with her endlessly self-destructive behavior. She still has it (whatever “it” is) when she performs, but these days its increasingly unlikely she’ll show up at all or, if she does, that she’ll be in any fit state to go on stage. Moss revels in the chaos and is given almost unlimited space from director Alex Ross Perry to do so, exhibiting a sort of malevolent glee in her self-destruction and leaving a trail of havoc in her wake.

Her fellow members of Something She have been with her for a long time, but there’s a limit to the abuse they’re willing to put up with in the name of band unity and it’s clear that their patience is running thin. Her ex-boyfriend Danny (Dan Stevens) just wants her to get her act together for the sake of the young daughter they have together, but he’s also getting tired of the endless second chances. Everything in her life is in a state of collapse, and it’s only a matter of time before everything comes crashing down.

Aside from the impressive lead performance from Elisabeth Moss, the film’s strongest element is its depiction of the riot grrrl punk scene of the 1990s. The music doesn’t feel as though it was simply written for the film to serve as a backdrop to the rest of the drama — the songs operate almost as their own character in Her Smell, and all of them seem as though they would have been angry feminist anthems of the 90s. The dynamics between the members of the all-female bands, Something She and their up-and-coming successors the Akergirls feel genuine and lived-in.

Their friendships and cordial working relationships have complexity and richness to them — we believe that they’ve existed before the film began and will go on after we’ve stopped watching. That isn’t always the case with on-screen relationships between women, so it’s worth celebrating when you do see it.

There are times when Alex Ross Perry and Elisabeth Moss perhaps become self-indulgent, and the frenzied nature of the film verges into incomprehensibility and noise. But the level of risk-taking in the narrative and performances in this film is extraordinary, and to their credit almost always pays off.

Her Smell comes to theaters April 12, 2019. This film was reviewed at the Boston Independent Film Festival.