Can you separate the artist from the art? Lately that dusty theoretical question has been revived in reference to certain problematic men. How do we respond when greatness and awfulness coexist, or when talent is used as an alibi for gross misbehavior? Usually by fighting among ourselves.

“Her Smell,” Alex Ross Perry’s relentless new film, poses the problem in a different register, and not only because the difficult artist in question is a woman. The lead singer in an all-female trio called Something She, she goes by the name Becky Something. The nom de guerre (Becky is nothing if not combative) suggests both that self-invention is part of her creative program and that it remains incomplete. She used to be Rebecca Adamczyk (she’s played by Elisabeth Moss), and now she’s someone else.

The artist, in other words, is the art. That’s just rock ’n’ roll canon, from Elvis (Presley or Costello) to Johnny Rotten and beyond. St. Vincent is a Becky Something, and so is Cardi B. On a more literal level, Becky’s resemblance to Courtney Love is unmistakable, even if it’s also deniable. Some details track very closely; others don’t. But in spite of that warped mirroring, and in spite of its familiar VH1 “Behind the Music” rise-fall-redemption structure, “Her Smell” is no musical biopic.

It’s a train wreck in five acts, mostly unfolding offstage. We are behind the scenes in the aftermath of one concert and in the anxious run-up to two others. We are in a recording studio during an especially messy session and in the rambling country house where Becky takes refuge after everything falls apart. I say we are there because Perry’s camera is like a human presence: clammy, curious, caught between the urge to follow Becky everywhere and the impulse to run away from her.