Peach_Braxton

What can you say? Gary Oldman did the best with what he had. But what he had was a script that was derived from a story based on hearsay... and not from the Pistols themselves, but from The Clash! This is NOT the true of story of Sid and Nancy; the real people were far more pathetic and depressing than their on-screen counterparts. Alex Cox got the basic details correct: Sid and Nancy were low-life junkies; Sid was a replacement bass player for the Sex Pistols and couldn't play a lick; everyone hated Nancy; they lived in squalor; Sid ended up on Riker's Island, and Nancy ended up dead on a bathroom floor.

Nearly every other detail in the movie was terribly inaccurate, everything from Sid and Nancy first meeting to how Nancy was positioned when she was found dead. Also, some of these people were too old to play the characters; it's easy to forget that the Pistols and their contingent were all teenagers. Chloe Webb looked about forty, yet Nancy died when she was just twenty years old. Not only that, but the movie portrayed the rest of the Pistols as being mildly retarded, and seemed to enjoy and even opted to live like bums. In reality, even at the height of their success, the Sex Pistols were still very poor and unhappy with their surroundings. In John Lydon's autobiography, he remarks about one of the opening scenes that shows Sid and Johnny eating baked beans and champagne for breakfast. Back then, he couldn't even afford champagne. "Details don't matter; this movie is about feeling." Oh really? Tell that to the people who actually lived through this.

Go ahead and watch this movie for its cinematic enjoyment, but not as a biographical piece. It's been nearly thirty years since the train wreck called Sid & Nancy did themselves in... it would be nice if someone could make a new Sex Pistols movie that's based on facts, instead of some silly director's notion of who and what they were. And this time, no more romanticizing their story. What they had together wasn't love, but a very twisted co-dependent relationship. The silly cab ride to heaven somehow made Sid & Nancy some kind of a punk Romeo and Juliet, but they were just a couple of losers.