10. The Brown Bunny (2003)
Kudos to Sevigny for fully committing herself to fellating her director and co-star, Vincent Gallo, in the sleaziest, least necessary scene in his downbeat, 1970s-style road movie. Elsewhere, the driving sequences are mesmerising, but I must be careful what I write about the iffy sexual politics since Gallo once called me a “commie lesbian witch”.
9. Dogville (2003)
Despite a frizzy perm, Sevigny blends seamlessly into the starry ensemble cast of Lars Von Trier’s Brechtian morality play in which the houses in a Depression-era town are represented by white lines on a soundstage. Nicole Kidman seeks refuge from mobsters there, only for the townsfolk’s charity to turn into exploitation, exposing America’s underbelly in a gripping avant-garde experiment.
8. Trees Lounge (1996)
Steve Buscemi, a regular fixture of American independent cinema, stars in his own indie writing-directing debut. It’s a droll, low-key, beautifully observed study of an alcoholic who drives an ice-cream truck and becomes perilously involved with his ex-girlfriend’s 17-year-old niece – a precociously self-possessed performance by Sevigny in her follow-up to Kids.
7. Kids (1995)
Even before Sevigny’s film acting debut hit cinemas, Jay McInerney described her as the coolest girl in the world in a New Yorker profile. And in Larry Clark’s controversial study of young New York skate-punks doing drugs and having sex, she is unquestionably the main attraction, giving an effortlessly natural performance as Jennie, trying to track down the boy who took her virginity and left her HIV-positive.
6. Love & Friendship (2016)
Reuniting with Whit Stillman, her Last Days of Disco co-star and director, Sevigny swaps her usual kooky contemporaneity for period embonpoint in his delicious comedy of manners, inspired by an unfinished Jane Austen novel. She plays the American confidante to Kate Beckinsale’s hilariously unscrupulous Lady Susan in a sparkling divertissement that vexed Janeites, but delighted everyone else.
5. American Psycho (2000)
As Jean, Patrick Bateman’s long-suffering secretary, Sevigny is an oasis of relatability amid the gurning caricatures in Mary Harron’s satirical adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial novel. So when Bateman (Christian Bale) invites Jean round to his pad and gets out his nail gun, you find yourself praying she gets out of there alive.
4. Boys Don’t Cry (1999)
Kimberly Peirce’s heartbreaking dramatisation of the real-life tragedy of Brandon Teena, a young trans Nebraskan, won Hilary Swank an Academy award for best actress, while Sevigny received a best supporting nomination for her luminous performance as Lana, Brandon’s girlfriend. Predictably, the US ratings system had more problems with the orgasmic expressions lighting up Lana’s face during their love scene than with the rape and murder elsewhere in the film.
3. Gummo (1997)
The It Girl teamed up again with her Kids screenwriter (and then-boyfriend) Harmony Korine for his directing debut. She plays the platinum-haired Dot, and also designed the costumes (including the iconic bunny ears) in a narrative-lite portrait of an impoverished “white trash” community in Ohio where weird-looking kids sniff glue and roller-skate on front lawns. Twenty-seven years ago I loathed it, but it’s now clearly a work of near genius: poignant, funny and authentic, albeit requiring multiple content warnings.
2. Demonlover (2002)
Sevigny had to learn French dialogue phonetically for her role as an enigmatic secretary, yet pulls off a hellishly difficult metamorphosis from dogsbody into malevolent puppet-mistress when a glamorous industrial spy (Connie Nielsen) becomes obsessed with a torture pornography website. Olivier Assayas’ film similarly morphs from slick cyberthriller into Videodrome-style hallucination in one of the most baffling, beguiling films of the 00s.
1. The Last Days of Disco (1998)
“Chloë is a natural phenomenon,” said Whit Stillman, casting Sevigny in one of her best roles, as quiet but clever Alice, the key character in his enchanting portrait of preppies hanging out in early 1980s Manhattan. Loquaciousness is off the scale, especially from Kate Beckinsale, delivering a stream of outrageously backhanded remarks as Alice’s frenemy. Happily, it’s some of the wittiest dialogue in town, topped off by one of cinema’s loveliest end credit sequences.
