Crank up the vol­ume on the trail­er for punk epic Her Smell

Elis­a­beth Moss has now col­lab­o­rat­ed with direc­tor Alex Ross Per­ry on three films, each of them a small-scale, mod­est­ly-bud­get­ed affair pro­pelled by char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, dia­logue, and performance.

But the new­ly released trail­er for Her Smell hints at a fero­cious inten­si­ty sure to set this apart from the likes of Lis­ten Up Philip and Queen of Earth. If noth­ing else (and, make no mis­take, there’s plen­ty else), this film con­tains more coke-fueled scream­ing out­bursts than the rest of Perry’s fil­mog­ra­phy put together.

Moss whirls through the film with the force of a hur­ri­cane as Becky Some­thing, the volatile front­woman of fic­ti­tious riot grrrl group Some­thing She. The film assumes a Shake­speare­an five-act struc­ture to track Becky’s down­ward spi­ral of nar­cotics and solip­sism through to her even­tu­al recov­ery and revival – think Hen­ry VIII by way of Biki­ni Kill.

A stacked sup­port­ing cast orbits Becky, work­ing to keep her con­scious long enough to ful­fill their con­trac­tu­al oblig­a­tions: her band­mates (Agy­ness Deyn and Gayle Rankin), her long-suf­fer­ing record label impre­sario (Eric Stoltz), her ex-hus­band (Dan Stevens), her moth­er (Vir­ginia Mad­sen), and the trio of up-and-com­ers (Dylan Gelu­la, Ash­ley Ben­son, and Cara Delev­ingne) she threat­ens to drag into her mess.

The trail­er hums with the same anx­ious ener­gy as the film itself and its sub­ject, each of them one split-second’s impulse away from a spike of mania, rage, or violence.

At the film’s pre­mière in Toron­to last year, our own Han­nah Wood­head clocked it as ​“a soul­ful por­trait of a tal­ent­ed but trou­bled artist, not to men­tion an explo­ration of female friend­ships with­in an indus­try still dom­i­nat­ed by pow­er­ful men.” Her off-the-record com­ments offer a some­what more direct appraisal.

Her Smell comes to the­aters in the US on 12 April.