Finest hours: Chloë Sevigny in The Last Days of Disco

Chloë Sevigny’s acting career of three decades rarely makes it to print without reference to her as a so-called New York ‘It’-girl. The image has stuck since the New Yorker profiled her in the mid-90s as the epitome of street cool, comparing her to Twiggy, Audrey Hepburn and Edie Sedgwick. The 19-year-old, a fixture at nightclubs Limelight and the Tunnel, had just been cast in her debut role as a teen who tests positive for HIV in Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), scripted by her skateboard-scene friend Harmony Korine. 

She has said she always wanted to be a working character actress, and did not care for the style magazine hype. Her publicist entreated her to stop dressing idiosyncratically, to attract Hollywood studios, and allow audiences to project illusions onto her. But Sevigny has never shown a great appetite for commercial exposure. Beyond her unconventional looks, she emanates an elusive charisma; a preternatural calm in the eye of attention, and an unflappable disregard for the very notion of faking it to make it.

Following her Kids breakout, she continued to embody misfit edge in films about transgression, including American Psycho (2000), Party Monster (2003) and Dogville (2003), even as industry plaudits (in 2000, she won an Oscar nomination for Boys Don’t Cry) came her way. 

Today, her television roles, like the troubled mother of Nastasha Lyonne’s time-trapped lost soul in Russian Doll, also push darker themes. Most recently, she stars in Amalia Ulman’s Argentina-set Magic Farm (2025), an absurdist satire of Americans ripping off global subcultures for video content. 

Sevigny’s impeccable performance as Alice Kinnon in Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco (1998) is the role she’s most feted for – and it’s her off-screen ‘It’-girl reputation that makes it so interesting. To cast her as a girl in a much-mythologised New York club scene might be to expect her to fall back on the cool she seems to have so much of; to simply be herself. 

But Stillman does not reach for smooth, hedonistic spectacle in his look back on 1980 and the goings-on in and around a Studio 54-esque hotspot. His razor-sharp comedy of manners mixes genuine affection and nostalgia with merciless excoriation of striving bourgeois aspiration. The New York tribe he focuses on are not the innovators and trend-setters driving the disco phenomenon, but wannabes on the brink. 

Genteel, entitled ingenues just out of Ivy League colleges as yuppiedom takes hold, they are desperate to make their career mark, and approach clubgoing as another status game, their self-conscious repartee and dating machinations inside the exclusive venue requiring as much strategising as getting past the velvet ropes to enter.

Sevigny plays Alice, a publishing house employee whose work colleague Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) also becomes her housemate and fellow partygoer. Charlotte’s abrasive narcissism makes this more a pairing of reluctant convenience than true camaraderie for Alice, as they navigate potential romance with lawyers and the ad execs vilified by club management (Stillman had the two actresses again collaborate brilliantly in Love & Friendship (2016), his Jane Austen adaptation.) 

Alice’s veneer of demure put-togetherness barely hides the perpetual state of nervy vigilance regarding the expectations of upward mobility that she and her peers exist in. A cocktail preference seems as consequential as naming a preferred author in her naive urgency to master the rituals and syntax that make up a winning persona. 

As Stillman turns the ever-looming faux pas into a fertile ground for grotesque outlandishness involving Scrooge McDuck and sexually transmitted diseases, Sevigny never abandons her canny subtlety in interpreting the way in which culture-coded spaces operate. Her Alice retains a quiet curiosity and searching intelligence, even as she tamps down her better instincts and scans for cues and behaviours to emulate. 

Even amid her humiliations, we do not lose sight of her latent perspicacity, and when she advances professionally by spotting the potential of a book on Buddhism that Charlotte passed over, we understand, even as this is deadpan gold for wry laughs, she’ll be the one to thrive once past her youthful jitters. 

As Sevigny memorably conveys, affectation offers limited mileage – especially once, under capitalism, a subculture becomes a transactional commodity, and image conformity a tragicomedy.

Magic Farm is in cinemas from 16 May.