Sid and Nancy (1986)

I last saw this movie when it came out in the mid-1980s, and as a long-time aficionado of punk rock, one had to say that 'Sid and Nancy' was awful. Irredeemably awful. I saw it again just last night, and it was worse. Over the decades since Sid kicked Nancy's bucket and then his own, several documentaries, unearthed footage and books of reminiscences have strengthened our acquaintance with the 'punk rock' story and its myriad sub-plots. However, as the director and co-writer of 'Sid and Nancy', Alex Cox would have known the entire story back in the early 1980s. He just didn't want to film it. Instead we get a wildly inaccurate phantasmagoria starring two painfully overacting hams who look several years older than the historical characters they are meant to be portraying. The entire English punk scene is pulped down into a bunch of exaggeratedly lurching, moronic and pettily destructive idiots falling over repeatedly and making life difficult for themselves and others. What about the intelligence and originality of the Buzzcocks or the Banshees? What about the Clash's social conscience? What about the Sex Pistols' media-savvy and musical talent? Check 'The Punk Rock Movie'; Sid actually could play, albeit in a basic 'Dee Dee Ramone' manner, and if you'd like to listen to the live bootlegs, they bear little resemblance to the incompetent racket served up by the 'Sex Pistols' in 'S & N'. Moreover, couldn't Cox have staged the 'Pistols' English gigs with an audience who doesn't look like it was straight out of 1984? Check the half-mohawks and the 'positive punk' girls' puffed-up hair. Almost as bad as Spike Lee's 'Summer of Sam'. While we're at it, why are there no swastikas? So what if Alex Cox didn't want them in his precious movie; in 1976-77 they were right there in front of everybody. Again, check the footage. Sid Vicious made the swastika t-shirt an icon; he pretty much lived in one. You might as well try to do a bio-pic about the Grateful Dead and leave out the peace symbol. Look, as you can tell, I could easily spend 10,000 words telling you how insultingly bad, stupid and dishonest this movie is. Maybe one day I will, but suffice to say that with its focus on two of the most obnoxious, universally disliked and talent-free members of the 1970s punk movement it is a totally charm-free excursion into bio-pic territory. It is also intolerably bad history.

Fmovies: This vivid recreation of the last, not quite desperate days of Sex Pistol Sid Vicious and his junkie/lover Nancy Spungen celebrates all the pathetic excesses of punk rock anarchy, but without the overwrought clichés Oliver Stone would later use to embalm kindred rock martyr Jim Morrison. It would be hard to find a more honest and unsettling portrait of show biz degradation, and yet the two lovers shared an almost tender (if self-destructive) affection for each other, conveyed by director Alex Cox with a gritty, forthright lyricism (their silhouetted embrace amidst a hail of garbage provides the film's most telling image). If nothing else, the pair were certainly more loyal to the nihilistic punk aesthetic than their contemporaries, and the film chronicles their slow, co-dependent suicide from the gutters of swinging London to the alleys of New York City, with an ill-conceived detour to Nancy's white-bread Middle America homestead. Gary Oldman brilliantly captures the ignorant anger (and sometimes disarming innocence) of the man described by Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren as a "fabulous disaster", and Chloe Webb is equally fine as the ugly duckling drug addict Nancy.

Recent social history is very hard to capture through drama and Alex Cox must be grateful to have such a good plot device (a far from standard love story) to carry us through this difficult and much misunderstood period of history.

Punk rock was born to be a cult. Through all the headlines and publicity the central music barely scrapped the US charts: The Sex Pistols one studio album only just crept in to the American top 100 and they were viewed more as a novelty act than the next big thing. Only when the whole thing was tamed and popified did the thing take off, by then renamed "new wave" to differentiate between the new and old school.

(By this time the Pistols had long since self-destructed.)

In the beginning, the Sex Pistols were more a private party than a band, indeed they often played them instead of more normal gigs. The original punks were anti fashion and anti everything, attracting misfits of all kinds and colours; although art and fashion students made up the majority. This really was an open house with prostitutes, homosexuals and exhibtionists being equally welcome.

(This is accurately depicted in the movie.)

Sid and Nancy were from this hanging-on group and although joining the group as bassist and groupie respectively (Nancy tried to get it on with most of the band) they were never more than window dressing. The Pistol sound was Lydon/Rotten's voice and Steve Jones's power chords. Sid never even played on the records.

It is notable that many icons manage to have an icon haircut (Elvis, Rolling Stones, Beatles all set hair fashions) and amazingly SV even managed one himself with his perfect spikes. His look, his life and his early death made him a cult, but he didn't leave a legacy behind other than a series of half-hearted drunken rants.

Hard to see how Oldman could do more to be Vicious other than lose a few years. SV died at 21 and Oldman is clearly older (28 at the time of filming), but that is my only quibble. Chloe Webb (as Nancy) is also good, but annoying, like a dog that won't shut up barking and chewing the furniture, until you just accept it. A life consisting of drugs, sex and TV - often consumed all at the same time.

Alex Cox's direction (possibly because he knew the punk movement first hand rather than through the papers) is first rate - like Quentin Tarantino lite - but he is just as much a flash-in-the-pan as Sid and Nancy himself. He can't make a mainstream movie, because all he is interested in is man's ugly underbelly and without major acting talent these things look self-indulgent and even amateurish.

However this is a moral look at drug taking - not the "fun before it gets serious" moral - the "its never a good idea full stop" one. Sid is a child, Nancy is barely any more than a child, but more street-wise. Too lazy for work she used oral sex like most people use a credit card.

I like this film because it has something to say about undeserved fame, what you do (or the few choices you have) after your fifteen minutes is up and how empty headed people with no agenda get treated in this big bad world. Whether you want to spend time learning all this is up to you, but it is very well done if you do.

Sid and Nancy fmovies. The brilliant performances of Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb in the title roles propel this bleak and depressing look into the calamitous relationship between Sex Pistols bass player Sid Vicious and American punk rock groupie Nancy Spungen. The characters are introduced to us in tragedy right from the opening scene, casting the rest of the film with a fatalistic sense of impending doom. These are two tortured souls in communion who seem at odds with just about every facet of society -- even the extreme punk rock counter-culture to which they both ostensibly belong.

A major problem with the film (and all the more reason to tip our hats to the two leads) is that Sid and Nancy are written as such abrasive and disagreeable characters, one is hard pressed to relate to them on any meaningful level.

And while the re-creation of their reckless and volatile rebelliousness is quite detailed and credible, we never get a sense of how they came to be so angry and tortured to begin with. Even the smallest glimpse at their inner turmoil would have gone a long way in creating sympathy and concern from the audience. Instead, director Cox relies on the pureness of their genuine love for each other to provide that hook. That strategy succeeds to the extent it does ONLY because of Oldman's and Webb's amazing transformation into these parts.

If you own a DVD player, try to get a hold of the Criterion Collection edition of this film. That disc contains some excellent, revealing footage of the REAL Sid and Nancy that was shot for a contemporary documentary on the Sex Pistols ill-fated 1978 tour of the USA. If nothing else, the footage will increase your appreciation for these two splendid performances.

You really need to ask yourself if you love the Pistols and the general era of the late 70's. If you do, the film will fall flat for you.

The details are all wrong, the key incidents of the band and Sid's involvement with them are way off. The personalities of key people are wrong, some characters just made up, rather sloppily too.

So we can forgive it for being a wholly inaccurate of Sid Vicious' life. Fine, but so then what we are left with is a basic love story. It fails at this too, mostly because Nancy is written out pure spite and misogyny. She is therefore not only unlikable but wholly uninteresting.

You never believe the love story, because quite frankly Nancy isn't really written as a human being, just a series of tropes about junkies and that awful idea that women are shrews that stifle men's creativity.

The truth is Nancy was much more physically beautiful than this film wishes to admit. She was also quite charming, in fact, if you know junkie culture, you know that charm, deadly psychotic charm is a key way to survive and support your habit. None of that is shown here, so that ability for junkies to convince others they are clean, or kind or honest is obliterated.

Nancy was smarter than this film gives credit for (yes even though she was a junkie), with more charisma too and if they had written her that way it would make for a better film.

The real Sid fell in love with a real human being, a flawed one to be sure, but the kind of junkie a lot of us could fall for. In this film she's just a very nasty series of dull, obvious tropes.

Just about everyone intimately involved with the Sex Pistols has disowned this film.

I think there are moments of visual poetry in this film, I think Gary Oldman's performance is excellent, but the script is a Hollywood hackneyed attempt to reduce the Sex Pistols to every stereotype and narrow prejudice those who were never punks have always harbored about the punk movement.

It's sad because there is some real craft to this film, it had tremendous potential, but ultimately you can just never believe Sid would fall for this less-than-human harpy. Sad because there's a real reason Nancy swept Sid off his feet.

The truth, in this case, is not only stranger than fiction, it was also far more compelling.

I missed SID & NANCY when it was first released. I wasn't expecting much when settling down to watch the DVD. I was pleasantly surprised to find a coherent, energetic but ultimately melancholy study of co-dependency, with two terrific central performances.

We get to know Chloe Webb's child-woman Nancy to a greater extent than we do Gary Oldman's wild-man Sid. Not the actors' fault. In fact it's not a fault at all. There is something inexplicable there. Whatever forces were at play in forming the young man who became Sid Vicious, it's to the credit of Alex Cox and his team that they don't waste time speculating upon them or trying to analyse them. Instead, the film lives up to its title, starting just before the relationship starts and ending just after Nancy's death.

The era in which the film was made is a significant factor in appreciating it. It was, in the UK at any rate, a time when the welfare state that had been so painstakingly put into place began to be systematically unravelled, a land where the notion of Society was belittled, in which hyper-individualism was lauded, where any sense of community was being abandoned, and the search for it becoming a joke. WALL ST, the'hero' of which was to famously declare Greed to be good, was released the year after SID AND NANCY. I remember all that only too well. And of course it's not over yet: the unravelling continues.

Sid and Nancy meet in a frenzy and finish in a fog. In between they shore each other up as best they can, two bits of flotsam on an indifferent sea. We're shown only a little of where Sid came from, mercifully not enough to help us theorise about how he came to be the embodiment of anarchy. Instead, through Oldman's bravura, we see his unmitigated charisma, at which the film's unctuous Malcolm McClaren (played by David Hayman) smiles knowingly and which he merrily exploits. We do see Nancy in the context of her family, but again, instead of attempting to use this encounter to explaining her, Cox gives us a sense of how pleased the family was to get rid of her. If Romeo and Juliet had been like Sid and Nancy, the Montagues and the Capulets would have paid to get them married and out of Verona altogether.