Filmmaker Alex Ross Perry‘s “Her Smell” is one of the most ambitious and uncompromising films of 2019. Starring Elisabeth Moss in an unremitting, tour-de-force performances as self-destructive punk rocker in the vein of Courtney Love, or ’90s riot grrrl rockers Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kill/Le Tigre, or bands like L7 or Babes In Toyland, “Her Smell” charts her struggles with sobriety while trying to recapture the creative inspiration that led her band to success. But it’s far less conventional than it may sound. Chaptered up into five acts and modeled in a Shakespearean tradition, “Her Smell” is arguably, in musical terms, three acts of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music—loud, abrasive, aggressive, unrelenting—as Moss’ Becky Something spirals out of control and then two acts of something much more minor key and elegiac; perhaps to keep the Reed theme going, something more akin to “Pale Blue Eyes” and the Velvet Underground’s third eponymous album.
READ MORE: ‘Her Smell’: Elisabeth Moss Shines In Alex Ross Perry Tale Of Punk Rock Excess [Review]
It’s a difficult feat to pull off as a movie and is even more difficult to conceive and create in the writing stage, but Ross (known for unconventionally structured movies like the triptych “Listen Up Philip”) does so with style, aplomb, and poise. The Playlist is thrilled to debut the exclusive PDF of the “Her Smell” screenplay which you can download and read right here.
“It’s exciting to talk about a script because they have many different readers and no audience,” Perry told us in a recent interview.
He added, “Shakespeare forms the foundations of all modern drama, but only narratively. You can recycle character tropes or plots endlessly, but for some reason, the structure is the basis for almost nothing. This is why I’m happy to sit and talk about this aspect in specific. It’s interesting how differently people perceive the concept of good writing.”
You can read that interview momentarily, download and read the screenplay here and while you’re at it, watch the Alex Ross Perry-directed video for Soccer Mommy’s latest single, “yellow is the color of her eyes,” below. “Her Smell” is available now on DVD/Blu-Ray and most VOD and digital platforms.
