I SHOT ANDY WARHOL: A 1960s Crime Through a 1990s Lens

The debut feature from director Mary Harron (American Psycho, The Notorious Bettie Page), I Shot Andy Warhol tells the story of how Valerie Solanas, militant feminist and author of the SCUM Manifesto, came to believe that Andy Warhol had so much control over her life that she had to kill him. The idea of the film was controversial enough at the time that Lou Reed refused to allow The Velvet Underground’s music to be used in it, afraid that the film would glorify Solanas. (Needless to say, John Cale didn’t have the same concern; he composed the score.) Thirty years later, one sees that I Shot Andy Warhol—now available in a new 4K restoration—does not celebrate what Solanas did; rather, it shines a keen light on why such a brilliant and desperate woman would feel driven to commit such a terrible act.

The Art Life

I Shot Andy Warhol begins with Solanas’s attempted murder of Warhol on June 3, 1968, and then rewinds to show us how she got to this point. There was the troubled childhood, including sexual abuse at the hands of her father; there was also the realization, during school, that she was highly intelligent and a talented writer. While at college, where she earned a degree in psychology, she supported herself through sex work; she was an open lesbian who pursued women, but slept with men for money to get by.

Solanas (indie film icon Lili Taylor) eventually makes her way to New York, where she befriends another queer sex worker, Stevie (Martha Plimpton), and a transgender woman, Candy Darling (Stephen Dorff). It’s through Darling that Solanas is introduced to Andy Warhol (Jared Harris), who she attempts to get to produce her play, Up Your Ass: a play so dirty that Warhol and friends were worried it was part of a police plot to entrap them. The play is mislaid and mostly forgotten by everyone except Solanas, who grows increasingly desperate for her voice to be heard. That includes writing the SCUM Manifesto, which argues that men are biologically inferior to women, responsible for all of the world’s ills, and should become extinct.

Despite such outspoken hatred and disgust of men, Solanas keeps turning to them to survive: whether it be the johns she sleeps with, influential artists like Warhol, or the smooth-talking publisher Maurice Girodias (Lothaire Bluteau), who signs her to a predatory contract that she later comes to regret. Whatever you think about Solanas and the SCUM Manifesto, she was right about one thing: we live in a patriarchal society that grants more power and opportunities to men than to women, and boy, can it be frustrating.

Sex and Rage

Above all else, I Shot Andy Warhol is a prime vehicle for the unique talents of Lili Taylor, whose performance as Solanas is fierce, funny, and, if not quite sympathetic, certainly tragic. Solanas is depicted as someone who has a lot to say, but cannot find anyone willing to listen; she attempts to sell the SCUM Manifesto on the street for a quarter, but cannot get anyone to take it, even for free. When you’re constantly shouting into the void, it can be all too tempting to dive right in and let the darkness swallow you up. Does it excuse what Solanas did? No, but it does provide necessary context.

The latter part of the film, in which Solanas begins to unravel and alienates everyone around her with her paranoid ravings, is truly difficult to watch, and makes you wish that society had taken better care of her. If it had, then both Solanas and Warhol would have been better off. Warhol suffered physically and emotionally from the shooting for the rest of his life, dying following surgery in 1987 at the age of 58. Meanwhile, Solanas was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia; she spent the rest of her life alternating between institutionalization and homelessness before dying in 1988 at age 52.

Taylor isn’t the only actor who stands out in I Shot Andy Warhol, though she is the fireball that hurtles through the film and sets each frame alight. Jared Harris’s performance as Warhol is fascinating; it feels more human and less alien than many that have come before and since. There is a great scene in the middle of the film during a party at the Factory that, besides allowing the audience to live vicariously through the characters who populated that distinct cultural milieu in an iteration of New York City that will probably never exist again, also highlights the one thing Solanas and Warhol had in common: they were both outsiders. (It’s no surprise that Harron, a former music journalist for Punk magazine, would be interested in exploring such perpsectives in her feature debut, nor that she has continued to do throughout her directorial career.) Throughout the party, people are kissing and conversing, dancing and doing drugs together (and uttering some hilarious inane lines), all except Warhol and Solanas; they both stand alone on the outskirts of the mass of partygoers, observing but not interacting, looking but not touching. You can see why Solanas would be drawn to Warhol, convinced that he would understand her enough to help her.

It’s impossible to talk about I Shot Andy Warhol without talking about Stephen Dorff’s performance as transgender Warhol Superstar Candy Darling. Thirty years later, it’s clear that casting a cisgender man as a transgender woman is problematic, especially since it feeds into the transphobic insults that Solanas, with her militant ideas regarding gender, hurls at Darling throughout the film; it allows Darling to be seen as a man in women’s clothing, rather than as the woman she was. (Conversely, it’s great that Darling will actually be played by a transgender actress, Hari Nef, in an upcoming biopic that Nef also wrote.) Nonetheless, Dorff’s performance is sensitive and, in a film full of abrasive characters, one of the softest, fitting considering Darling voices a distaste for hardness in people.

Conclusion

An incisive depiction of the violent clash between pop art and radical politics, I Shot Andy Warhol remains one of the most electric debut features of the 1990s.

The new 4K restoration of I Shot Andy Warhol opens in New York and Los Angeles on June 12, 2026, with additional markets nationwide to follow.