Sid y Nancy

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.

Sid and Nancy is a movie about the tortured relationship between Sid Vicious and his whiny girlfriend, Nancy. Please, somebody turn down the volume on this one, simply because her voice is just too irritating on this critic's last nerve! (Did she really talk like that, or was Ms. Webb in serious need of a voice coach? We may never know.) Most of Sid and Nancy revolves around the two titled post-teen's attempt to maintain some semblance of a real relationship in the midst of a lot of drugs and self-induced violence. What stopped me from turning off this sad statement of a generation was the performance of Gary Oldman. His sneering imitation of Sid's contempt for almost everyone around him masked a touching vulnerability when it came to Nancy and – yep, even their pet kitty.

And I've got to give the truly unforgettable award to Sid and Nancy, based on one single cinematic moment in the film--- you know what that moment is, don't you? Yeppers - Sid belting out a searing rendition of Old Blue Eye's favorite, "My Way". Set against a backdrop of stairs (that call to mind every high school assembly), Oldman scratches and claws at this song with such a ferocious intensity I'd give him the gold statue right now.

Because that's what a cinematic moment really is, the sum total of the character, presented to the audience in a kernel of truth. Gary Oldman – an actor whose gold statuette is long overdue — captures the twin torments of a twisted teen that really just wants to be loved and doesn't know how to get past his own angry angst.

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.

When I was 15, I loved this movie because I loved the Sex Pistols and everything punk. Now that I am twice that age, I love this film for its unflinching portrayal of two people's lives, despite how uncomfortable it makes us, how little we sympathize with them as people, or how hard it is for us to comprehend the choices they made. I personally believe at least part of the discomfort comes from the fact that at some level, we DO understand Sid and Nancy, their love for each other, and the choices they make beneath the haze of addiction.

I realize, seeing it with adult eyes, why my parents were so shocked I was watching this film in 1987. But ironically, it was the best anti-drug message I could have seen in my teenage years. In performances so masterful they make me wince, fight off nausea, and weep for their misfortune, Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb constructed characters no one would ever want to be. The supporting cast deserves accolades as well - in particular, Andrew Schofield turns in a seamless portrayal of Johnny Rotten, who, unlike Sid, knows full well Malcolm MacLaren created him.

Having read "And I Don't Want To Live This Life" by Debora Spungen, and having seen more than a handful of documentaries with live footage of the band throughout the years, what impressed me most was the consistency of tone that Oldman and Webb bring to their performances. They are spot-on, not just in stupor and excess, but in tenderness and rare moments of clarity. The movie's ending was unique among biopics where the truth is in dispute, in that it did not profess to know the answer to that burning question (did Sid kill Nancy?) any more than Sid knew himself.

Why watch a film about a couple of junkies who came from unremarkable backgrounds and disappeared into the bleakness of drug addiction? We seem to want our films to be about something loftier than ourselves. I view "Sid and Nancy" more as a play than a movie - we allow our plays to be about uncomfortable subjects and unhappy people, but seem to think that celluloid must be as bright as the projector light behind it. This film is a study in love and dysfunction; its characters are painfully imperfect but perfectly portrayed and we cannot help but respond, even if our response is the deep, squirming discomfort that leads us to say we disliked the whole experience.

I rated this film a very rare 9.

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.