Part of Music City Mondays
The scintillating feature debut of Mary Harron (AMERICAN PSYCHO) and one of the most controversial independent films of the 1990s, I SHOT ANDY WARHOL stars an electric Lili Taylor as Valerie Solanas, a militant feminist whose attempted murder of Andy Warhol brought instant fame to her radically anti-male SCUM Manifesto. Dropping out of grad school in the mid-1960s, the brilliant yet volatile Solanas survived in New York City as a destitute artist, sex worker and panhandler, soon striking up a friendship with Warhol superstar Candy Darling that brought her briefly into the orbit of the world’s premier pop artist. With vivid, hallucinatory attention to historical detail, Harron captures the explosive cross-pollination of New York’s political and artistic countercultures as well as the creativity, snobbery and decadence at the heart of the legendary Factory. Anchored by pitch-perfect performances — and featuring a blistering score by John Cale as well as covers of ‘60s hits by some of the n’90s’ most iconic bands (R.E.M., Wilco) — I SHOT ANDY WARHOL is an incisive portrait of a rebel without an outlet and the soon-to-be-lost generation she came to define.
“Harron, a first-time director…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.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (May 17, 1996) “Unlike so many retellings of famous assassinations, attempted or otherwise, Harron’s movie gets to the heart of its subject’s discontent without dwelling on dramatizations of Solanas’ fragile psyche…. I SHOT ANDY WARHOL characterizes Solanas in a way that neither the press nor her manifesto could. Harron asserts that Solanas’ actions were not the result of a brief, blind rage, but of a chronic discontent — a state of mind that looks all the more familiar two decades later.” —Coleman Spilde, Salon
