Starring Elisabeth Moss. Rating unavailable

Elisabeth Moss delivers an unforgettable performance that almost makes Her Smell worth watching.

Playing Becky Something, a '90s alt-rocker who is definitely not based on Courtney Love, Moss embodies the once-successful frontwoman's downward spiral into...well, into just about everything towards which someone could conceivably spiral downward. For the first two-thirds of the movie, writer-director Alex Ross Perry shows us Becky alienating herself from her long-suffering bandmates, neglecting her infant daughter, and generally losing touch with reality with the help of a self-styled shaman whose brief seems to be "Make everything worse."

Moss plays strung-out and self-destructive scarily well, and Perry makes it very clear that Becky is a mess who is on a mission to torpedo whatever good will she has left with those closest to her.

What he doesn't make so clear is why. We get that Becky's an addict of some sort, and the peripheral presence of her hand-wringing mother (Virginia Madsen) seems intended to convey that our flaming star's childhood wasn't something out of The Waltons. Perry leaves the job of connecting all the dots to the viewer, who—after an hour of watching Becky flail and terrorize friend and frenemy alike—will likely be too exhausted to take on that much heavy lifting.

Some sense of what's at stake would have helped. On-the-nose flashbacks inform us that Becky's band, Something She, earned at least one gold record, and had once upon a time been a big enough deal to warrant a SPIN cover story. The notion that Becky is squandering her immense talent is unsupported by any evidence that she really possesses any, however. The film opens with a riotous live performance, sure, but the song is the Only Ones' much-covered "Another Girl, Another Planet". Her Smell is almost over by the time we finally get a sense that, yes, this woman can actually write a song. (This revelation comes toward the end, in a genuinely moving scene wherein Becky plays a soul-baring number for her erstwhile bassist, played by Agyness Deyn.)

Some saving grace is found in the film's final third, when Perry gives us a glimpse of the human being behind the punk-rock persona. Moss is, unsurprisingly, just as adept at playing a cleaned-up Becky as she is at chewing the scenery as the walking-train-wreck version—although the latter was probably a lot more fun.