Lili Taylor is astonishingly good as the bright but highly-disturbed woman who tried to kill the celebrated non-artist. We see the story told in dislocated flashback as the would-be assassin Valerie Solanis is arrested and interviewed after the shooting. Home movie footage is poignantly interleaved with Valerie's matter-of-fact admissions.
Having been abused as a child, and sexually promiscuous before puberty, Solanis developed a strong antipathy towards men during her student years at the University of Maryland. She financed her degree course by means of prostitution. The film shows her living rough in New York City between 1966 and 1968, begging, soliciting for sex and performing radical street theatre.
She is drawn into the twilight world of Warhol's 'court' of phoneys and hangers-on, a disturbed New York wise-ass who demands recognition but who will never be taken seriously by these Beautiful People.
Jared Harris plays Warhol beautifully as the inarticulate, vacuous fraud at the head of a sham 'movement'. Significantly, Warhol does not get involved in whatever's going on. A Warhol film is being shot in The Factory, but we learn that Andy won't be around today. A drug-besotted 'happening' takes place under the Warhol aegis, but Andy stays on the margins, even of the sex - his purpose is to hit on the wealthy voyeurs who turn up at his parties.
As Warhol the cynical manipulator grows in media credibility, Solanis is reduced to peddling squalid sex and copies of her manifesto around Greenwich Village. It is clear that she has been 'dropped' by the court of Queen Drella. She becomes increasingly embittered, feeling that Warhol is exploiting her writings, and her behaviour deteriorates into violence and incoherence. When she shows up in the same old rags at the newly-gentrified Factory, we grasp what she can't - that the gulf between her and these parasites with savvy is unbridgeable.
Solanis beds a fellow weirdo, and acquires a gun from him. We see their drug-induced disorientation in a sequence of crash-edits, a knowing reference to the pop style of sixties film-making.
This is a very shrewd and very watchable film. It damns Warhol, but is none the worse for that.
Having been abused as a child, and sexually promiscuous before puberty, Solanis developed a strong antipathy towards men during her student years at the University of Maryland. She financed her degree course by means of prostitution. The film shows her living rough in New York City between 1966 and 1968, begging, soliciting for sex and performing radical street theatre.
She is drawn into the twilight world of Warhol's 'court' of phoneys and hangers-on, a disturbed New York wise-ass who demands recognition but who will never be taken seriously by these Beautiful People.
Jared Harris plays Warhol beautifully as the inarticulate, vacuous fraud at the head of a sham 'movement'. Significantly, Warhol does not get involved in whatever's going on. A Warhol film is being shot in The Factory, but we learn that Andy won't be around today. A drug-besotted 'happening' takes place under the Warhol aegis, but Andy stays on the margins, even of the sex - his purpose is to hit on the wealthy voyeurs who turn up at his parties.
As Warhol the cynical manipulator grows in media credibility, Solanis is reduced to peddling squalid sex and copies of her manifesto around Greenwich Village. It is clear that she has been 'dropped' by the court of Queen Drella. She becomes increasingly embittered, feeling that Warhol is exploiting her writings, and her behaviour deteriorates into violence and incoherence. When she shows up in the same old rags at the newly-gentrified Factory, we grasp what she can't - that the gulf between her and these parasites with savvy is unbridgeable.
Solanis beds a fellow weirdo, and acquires a gun from him. We see their drug-induced disorientation in a sequence of crash-edits, a knowing reference to the pop style of sixties film-making.
This is a very shrewd and very watchable film. It damns Warhol, but is none the worse for that.