A portrait of Valerie Solanas--the woman who gunned down Andy Warhol and almost killed him. The film is also a paean to Warhol--the true king of pop--and the world which he created around him in the late 1960s. Using the disturbed, but frequently brilliant, visionary-feminist Solanas as her focal point (Solanas was the founder and sole member of SCUM, the Society for Cutting Up Men), filmmaker Mary Harron paints a vividly realistic picture of the subculture that surrounded Warhol and his infamous studio, the Factory. Despite her desperate circumstances, there's a feisty vibrancy to Solanas. She's a game, dead-end kid who bristles with the kind of knowing toughness that can turn a pervert's solicitation into an opportunity. And when standard panhandling lines fail her, she offers her services as a scintillating conversationalist--for pay. Even when she subsequently spirals into a world dominated by paranoid delusions, her intelligence and wit shine through.