Sid and Nancy, the 1986 film that chronicles the calamitous relationship between Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and his American girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, succeeds on multiple levels as a heartbreaking love story about two outcasts who simultaneously attract and repel each other, a glorious snapshot of the chaotic rise and fall of the late 1970s punk rock era, and a shockingly unglamorous anti-drug message. Director Alex Cox, who had previously helmed the offbeat punk-edged sci-fi film,
Repo Man, brings an uncanny beauty to the squalor and decadence by way of brilliant camerawork, while Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb shine at their absolute best as the title characters.
Sid and Nancy was heavily criticized for its historical inaccuracies by Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon (Johnny Rotten), who, in his 1994 autobiography,
Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, wrote that the film celebrates heroin addiction. When I rented this movie on VHS tape while I was 16 years old and in 10th grade, however, its stark depictions of the filthy desolate world of addiction only served to intensify my lifelong phobia of drugs and medications in general, and, as such, I'll always look back on it as a strangely positive influence on my younger self. I had seen a great many drug awareness films and such in school by that time, but nothing shook me up as much as watching Oldman's Sid and Webb's Nancy holed up in their small grimy room at the Chelsea Hotel in New York as they repeatedly express a desire to straighten up and escape their addictions while sticking needles into their arms at the same time. The film noir trademark of flashback storytelling is employed here by introducing Sid as he is questioned by police after Nancy's death and using the interrogation to transport us back to the couple's first meeting in London, so we know from the start that things will not end well.
The music is, of course, wonderful. Alex Cox and the cast members effectively convey what it must have been like to attend a Sex Pistols gig, and there's a genuine urgency to the recreations of the band's London performances, their riverboat performance on the Thames, and their U.S. tour, which included stops in Atlanta and Texas. Reality is eschewed during several scenes, but to good cinematic effect. I've always loved one fictional moment where, after the breakup of the Pistols, Sid is playing one of his disastrously pathetic solo shows while John Lydon, played by Andrew Schofield, sits in the back of the venue and watches with tears in his eyes.
Although Sid's musical abilities were debatable at best, he nonetheless became the iconic face of punk rock due to his spiked hair, his sneer, and his “better to burn out than fade away” aesthetic. One could not go through a record store during the late 1980s of my youth without seeing Sid Vicious T-shirts and posters. Alex Cox's film, despite the factual inaccuracies, puts a human face on the phenomenon, and presents the ambiguous circumstances behind Nancy's death in a convincing way that I can imagine is pretty close to the truth. Sid's own demise is handled in a rather beautiful and dignified way, because, by that point in the film, we've already seen enough ugliness.
Be on the lookout for a young Courtney Love, who plays one of Nancy's friends in New York City.
Sid and Nancy is painful to watch in many ways, but I still love revisiting it and watching the stories of people who lived a life that none of us would want to live while creating the music that so many of us love to hear.
The Criterion Blu-ray of Sid and Nancy is beyond reproach in technical terms, and I think that it excels with regard to picture quality and audio presentation.
The supplemental material is almost as entertaining as the film itself, although a few of the extras are rather sobering. One particular documentary excerpt,
D.O.A.: A Rite of Passage, features a real interview with Sid and Nancy that makes me embarrassed for both of them. The commentaries and extras are openly frank with regard to the film's fictionalization of certain aspects of the true story and the cold reception of the film by many in the punk community.
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