Through being cool | Features Oct05 | Guardian Unlimited Film:
Chloë Sevigny was famous before anyone thought to ask if she was talented. Even today, 12 years after it happened, the story of how she came to be a celebrity seems worthy of an academic dissertation on the modern media; before Sevigny had appeared in a single frame of a single movie, the author Jay McInerney had written a seven-page profile about her in the New Yorker. It would take an obsessive kind of ambition, you might think, to force yourself on to that magazine's radar so early in your career - before, in fact, your career had even begun - except that apparently this wasn't the case. 'Part of the reason I agreed to do it was that he had agreed to buy me this Helmut Lang dress,' Sevigny says now, with an air of detachment, as if it all might have happened to someone else.
The article plucked Sevigny from her very localised fame - as a fashion beacon in downtown Manhattan, who hung out with models and photographers - and anointed her "the It girl with a street-smart style", and "the girl of the moment". "I love Jay McInerney. I think he's a great man and a great writer, but, you know ... a little out of touch," she says. "Maybe someone a bit younger would have been more able to capture the scene? It was kind of an older guy trying to make it something that he thought it was, to project something on to it." Sevigny stings so sweetly that it often takes a moment to realise how venomous she has just been...
Being the coolest person in New York was the first of several mantles she seemed unsure she deserved, or wanted. The next, which followed her debut role in Larry Clark's 1995 Aids drama Kids, was spokeswoman for her generation. Now, at 30, having been nominated for an Oscar for Boys Don't Cry, and having worked with the likes of Woody Allen and Lars von Trier, she's well ensconced in the third role - queen of the indies. She has described herself as "sick of being in this independent movie rut", and now, looking genuinely worried, she says: "I suddenly had this thought the other day. It occurred to me that I was really 1990s. I had this whole crisis.

Sevigny's most prominent recent role was in The Brown Bunny, in which she performs oral sex on the director and star (and Sevigny's ex-boyfriend) Vincent Gallo. Critics united to excoriate the movie; this paper's reviewer called it "so autistic, so painfully sincere, that it goes off the so-bad-it's-good scale into something else entirely". Sevigny has described Gallo's movie as "an art film" that "should be playing in museums", not exposed to the harsh expectations of the commercial market.