What a great film! I was sure I had seen it before but I absolutely hadn’t. And what I didn’t realise was that the person who shot Andy Warhol was Valerie Solanas! I feel like a bad feminist for not putting two and two together.

Valerie Solanas was a delightfully angry queer woman in the 60s who wrote the scum manifesto. Have you heard of it? My eldest child introduced me to it when they did a project on it for high school and I was secretly very proud. Scum stands for the society for cutting up men.

Lili Taylor plays Valerie and she is poor and angry and getting by by hustling on the streets. Having sex with a man to pay her rent fuels her hate fire and her writing.

Her friend Candy Darling (Stephen Dorff) introduces her to Andy Warhol and for a brief moment it’s possible that Andy might be a bit fascinated by her subversive anti culture persona. What Valerie can’t see though, is that she stirs up trouble and emotion and people really don’t want to have to engage with it. And she’s a TERF.

Warhol is played by Jared Harris and there are some lovely secondary characters, including Martha Plimpton as Valerie‘s fellow street urchin Stevie, and many familiar 90s faces (see if you can spot Law and Order’s Assistant DA Claire Kincaid, Jill Hennessy). Harris does a really good job at personifying Warhol, and all his awkward emotionless fascination with other people’s pain and drama.

We know what’s coming and so it is rather fascinating to see Valerie‘s world unravel and there is almost a small amount of satisfaction in seeing Warhols’ emotionless fade ruffled. The closing credits though make it clear that he never quite got over the shooting, and it seems everyone in his and Valerie’s orbit died young. All the cigarette smoking wouldn’t have helped.