I Shot Andy Warhol movie review (1996)

In following the life of Valerie Solanas from her wounded childhood to her moment of vindication, director Mary Harron and actress Lili Taylor go inside the mind of a woman who was deranged and possibly schizophrenic, and follow the logic of her situation as she sees it, until her act is revealed as the inevitable result of what went before.

Solanas, who was abused as a child and worked her way through college as a prostitute, comes across as a gifted woman who never quite loses a wry sense of humor. After a short career on her college paper (she writes columns arguing that females can reproduce without males and should do so), Valerie takes on Manhattan; she writes plays, does readings in luncheonettes, and is befriended by Candy Darling (Stephen Dorff), a transsexual who takes her for the first time to the Factory.

Warhol (Jared Harris) finds her as interesting as he finds anything. He puts her in one of his movies (“I, a Man”), and she emotes on a staircase of the Chelsea Hotel--too hot for Warhol's cool. She writes a play and hopes Warhol will produce it, but her precious typed playscript is tossed behind a sofa at the Factory, and when no one will return it to her, Solanas begins to get angry.

At this point she is essentially a bag lady, living and writing on the roof of a building, and supporting herself by prostitution and by selling copies of her radical lesbian feminist polemic, The S.C.U.M. Manifesto. The initials stand for “The Society for Cutting Up Men.” Her friends, including a sometime lover named Stevie (Martha Plimpton) try to help her, but no one in this self-obsessed world really sees her, listens to her, and cares.

Harron, a first-time director who co-wrote the screenplay with Daniel Minahan, does two remarkable things in her movie: She makes Solanas almost sympathetic and sometimes moving and funny, and she creates a portrait of the Factory that's devastating and convincing. Warhol emerges as a man whose entire being--intelligence, sexuality, artistry--seems concentrated in his detached, bemused gaze. (If Andy ever got a tattoo, I hope it read, “I like to watch.”) He fears personal contact; he snaps pictures and makes tapes of the people around him, and I imagine him later, alone, arranging those documents as an entomologist might pin butterflies to a corkboard.