The tagline on the film's poster says it all, to wit: You only get one shot at fame. On June 3 1968, Valerie Solanas took her shot. By all accounts an abused child who turned to prostitution to fund her education, Solanas came to New York in the mid sixties convinced that the rambling polemical essay she had written- The Scum Manifesto - was exactly the kind of literary agitprop every card-carrying ultra-radical feminist was waiting for. Sadly, neither Andy Warhol, into whose rarified orbit she initially ingratiated herself, nor her duplicitous publisher, deigned to take her seriously. In the end, rejected and abandoned, she walked into Warhol's Factory offices and pumped two bullets into him. Fortunately, he survived. Though Mary Harmon's low budget indie feature bears the odd ragged edge, its sense of time and place is evocatively persuasive, and Lili Taylor's focused central performance gives the narrative an urgency that never falters. As Warhol and transvestite superstar Candy Darling, both Jared Harris and Stephen Dorff are eerily perfect.
