Delayed Reaction: Her Smell

Premise: Becky Something is a hard-living punk-rocker who battles sobriety while trying to recapture the inspiration that rose her to fame.

My god, this movie was exhausting. Elisabeth Moss is a whirlwind. She tears through every scene and line with more gusto than most performers give in an entire movie. So much so, that later on, when she actually is quiet, the movie is still tense from wondering if it can last. Moss is absolutely great in this movie. It deserves to be rated among the best performances of 2019, although it was never going to get a nomination. This movie is deeply unpleasant by design. The first 90 minutes are about how miserable Becky can make everyone around her. The score is kind of amazing, because it just keeps throwing in sounds that made me think something awful was about to happen. I spent most of the movie waiting for this to lose all sense of reality and turn into The Neon Demon.

This is all paid off with the ending. At that point, we know how bad Becky can get. A relapse feels like it's just around the corner. Then she disappears briefly, and the movie has foregrounded why that's such a cause for concern. I love they it doesn't definitively say what happens. It almost doesn't matter if she's using again or not, because I'm just in favor of whatever allows her to give that closing performance.

This is absolutely Elisabeth Moss' movie, but Her Smell is overflowing with good supporting performances. Becky's bandmates (Gayle Rankin, Agyness Deyn) have the exact personalities of people you'd think could put up with Becky for so long. I really liked the younger female band with Cara Delevingne, Ashley Benson, and Dylan Gelula. They do a great job showing their unease with Becky in their first scene and irritation with her in their second scene. In general, the movie does a good job not letting Becky off the hook with the "troubled genius" label. She goes too far.

The length of the movie did lose me. I felt beat up by the end. Most acts, especially the one at the recording studio, crossed a point of diminishing returns. They were turning the screws just to see how much they could turn them. I imagine it was hard to cut out any amount of Moss' performance, but by the 2-hour mark, I was looking forward to the end in a way that I wasn't 90 minutes in.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend