By Ben Bussey
Biopics are always tricky. Bring any true life story to the screen, and questions will always be asked about just how accurate a representation of the events it really is. These concerns are amplified when the story in question is fresh in the popular consciousness, and centres on figures of some cultural significance. Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy is all of these things, and 30 years on from its initial release, it makes for peculiar, troubling viewing. One can only imagine how it came off at the time, barely six years after Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen died.
The film opens on a slow, portentous scene of Sid (Gary Oldman) sitting near catatonic, being grilled by the NYPD whilst the bloodied corpse of Nancy (Chloe Webb) is carted away. Then we flash back to the previous year, meeting Sid and his mate John (Drew Schofield) as they stagger around an affluent London street casually trashing a Rolls Royce. Moments later they’re up in a woman’s flat, and Sid just as casually sprays graffiti all over the walls whilst John eats a plate of presumably cold beans. That’s right – they’re punks. Dependent on your point of view, they might come off either gleefully anarchic and rock’n’roll, or a pair of colossal twats. This dichotomy persists with most of the characters we meet over the next two hours, and your enjoyment of the film is certain to vary according to how the viewer relates to this colourful ensemble – and, in particular, the two title characters. On a basic level, they’re all pretty much entirely unsympathetic, and often downright contemptible – yet, while the film does not gloss over the inherent horribleness of its characters, it also seems constantly at pains to convince us there’s some underlying romantic and heroic quality to them.
This never sets out to be Sex Pistols: The Movie, but naturally the band are a key focal point for the first half of the film, and while there’s clearly some fun to be had hearing such classic tracks as Pretty Vacant and God Save The Queen, these sequences also prove a bit of a chore. A key problem is Schofield’s John Lydon; he’s terribly miscast, coming off as a pantomime impersonation of the charismatic frontman. Meanwhile, Steve Jones and Paul Cook barely get a look in, with actors Tony London and Perry Benson treated as little more than extras – but they’re not the background players viewers are likely to remember. As well as giving Gary Oldman his first leading role on film, Sid and Nancy also boasts an early role for Kathy Burke (who would later reunite with Oldman on his first and to date only directorial effort Nil By Mouth, and get the best actress award at Cannes for her trouble); and, more notoriously, a small supporting turn from Courtney Love as a junkie friend of Nancy’s. Cox reportedly created the role for her after she pushed hard to be cast in the female lead, reportedly declaring “I am Nancy Spungen.” I’m not about to give anyone a history lesson in the 1990s music scene, but the real-life parallels here are striking and uncomfortable.
The Love connection (pardon the pun) underlines one of the key problems with Sid and Nancy: it’s so deeply entrenched in the pop culture of the late 20th century that it’s difficult to take it simply as a film in its own right. Naturally this will vary according to how well acquainted the viewer is with the subject matter; I’m hardly an obsessive Pistols fan, but still can’t help noting how recreations of certain iconic moments – say, the Grundy interview, and Lydon’s “ever feel like you’ve been cheated?” – feel stagey and inaccurate. Lydon reportedly had little input into the film, and was characteristically outspoken in condemning it afterwards; and Cox, to his credit, admits in the extras that he probably should have heeded Lydon’s advice and attempted a more heavily fictionalised take on the material. As it stands, Sid and Nancy toes an awkward line between kitchen sink realism, and dreamlike surrealism, which – despite some very striking images (Sid and Nancy kissing a New York alley whilst trash falls from the sky in slow-motion, for instance) – never quite sit rights given the very real ugliness of the story.
It’s quite sad that, having gone straight to directing this after his iconic debut Repo Man, Alex Cox has never really hit such heights as a filmmaker again; indeed, as a young film fan in the 1990s I knew him not as a director but as the host of BBC2’s Moviedrome (and I still hold him culpable for intensifying my adolescent sexual insecurity because of that one moment in Grim Prairie Tales, which Moviedrome screened). While there’s much about Sid and Nancy that is hugely misjudged, it still leaves one in no doubt that Cox knows how to put a film together – and given that his cinematographer is the now-legendary Roger Deakins, there’s no question that the film looks fantastic (although the Blu-ray transfer does have a bit of a grainy image, which proves distracting). And of course, Sid and Nancy set something of a precedent for Gary Oldman, who has frequently been the greatest strength in any number of flawed yet fascinating films (Coppolla’s Dracula being an obvious example). Even though, strictly speaking, Oldman was a little too old for the part – the actor was 28 at the time, and Vicious died at 21 – his natural magnetism is undeniable.
Unfortunately, the same can’t really be said for Chloe Webb as Nancy. To be fair, she’s playing the part that was given to her, that of a selfish, unstable, thoroughly unsympathetic young woman; but that’s literally all we get. There’s nary a hint of a redeeming quality to her, and given Webb’s loud, nasal delivery, she’s just profoundly annoying from the off, and this is a significant problem given how much time we spend with her, particularly in the latter half of the movie when – following the break-up of the Pistols – the title characters become pretty much the sole focal point, slipping into a downward spiral of addiction, squalor and despair from which they will not return.
The PR material for this 30th anniversary re-release pushes hard on the ‘cult classic’ angle, but does Sid and Nancy really warrant this status? Well, it certainly fits the essential ‘cult’ criteria inasmuch as it under-performed on release, but has since been warmly embraced by a small but devoted audience. Still, I don’t want to get on a soapbox, but I do find it worrying to think that many viewers may be taken in by Cox’s portrayal of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen as some sort of modern day fairy tale romance. Again, to be fair to Cox, his interview in the extras sees him express regret over how much they sentimentalised the story, rightly singling out the closing dream sequence as a particular mistake. Whilst Sid and Nancy plays out to some extent as a cautionary tale, there’s no avoiding a sense of ‘heroin chic’ at play, a glamourised nihilism reinforcing the myth that dying young is in some way admirable. Maybe some of us would call that the spirit of punk rock; I just call it a waste. The story Sid and Nancy may be a true tragedy, but that certainly doesn’t make them Romeo and Juliet.
Following on from a limited theatrical re-release, Sid and Nancy 30th anniversary edition is out on Blu-ray and DVD on 29th August, from Studiocanal.