LIVE THROUGH THIS

“This next one’s a cover.”

So says Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss), the ’90s alt-rocker at the center of writer-director Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell, midway through the film, as she sits on a piano bench right before what might just be the most important moment of her life. Becky is—or was—the lead singer and guitarist of the all-female trio Something She, alongside bassist Marielle Hell (Agyness Deyn) and drummer Ali van der Wolff (Gayle Rankin), and she has—or had—something of Kathleen Hanna’s unsanded defiance, something of Courtney Love’s tabloid magnetism.

By this point in the film, Becky is at the start of her redemption arc, before getting the band back together to rebuild the wreckage of youthful destructive creativity. This comes in a sequence like the end of Olivier Assayas’s own rock-recovery drama (2004), with glassy, fragile textures, Moss’s overthought gestures suggesting someone relearning how to live. Every performance in  is gratifyingly shown uncut, but this one is the showstopper: a cheesy, nostalgic pop hit you’d be tempted to sing along to were it not for the stripped-down arrangement and Moss’s raw, plaintive performance. That Becky would make it back from the wilderness by picking her way through someone else’s music and lyrics—a film about the careening mimetic rush of DIY artmaking, including its own maker’s origins in DIY filmmaking.