Sid e Nancy

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.

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.

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.

This movie is not historically accurate. Let's get that out of the way right off the bat. This is not about the history of the Sex Pistols. Details don't matter, this movie is about feeling. Two misguided, deluded outcasts who are so completely, desperately in love, that they won't leave each other, even though they are probably the worst people in the world for each other. They spiral into heroin addiction, (which is NOT glamorized. Some of the scenes with them bunkered down in the Chelsea Hotel are downright disgusting) and one of them is killed, although no one knows how exactly how. Punks are usually the unsentimental type, so they tend to give this film the two-finger salute. Well, screw them. It is a beautiful film, which speaks more honestly about love and addiction than any Oscar-grabbing shite that I can find in the New Release section. Gary Oldman and and Chole Webb are excellent, inhabiting their characters right down to marrow. The era is evoked wonderfully, and the film is littered with gorgeous, iconic images, the best of which being Sid and Nancy kissing in an alleyway while garbage rains down on them from above like rice at a wedding. Also, most people ignore how FUNNY this movie is, despite it's heartbreaking subject matter. This is an enjoyable movie, not a punishment, or a slog through the mud. After seeing this movie, a friend of mine was so moved, she packed up everything she had and moved to London, where she lived on the streets for a year, trying to form a punk band. I'd recommend this movie to anyone, not just punks or Sex Pistols fans. It's appeal is much more universal than that. To me, this movie exemplifies my idea of true love. It isn't always pretty. It can drag you over glass, lead you to your grave, debase, humiliate, and destroy you. But it's a connection so strong that you can't deny it. And it's so beautiful that you really don't care if it kills you.

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.