Who Killed Nancy?

I've long outgrown the phase of my life when I was deeply fascinated by Sid and Nancy but I have read Nancy's mother's biography And I Don't Want to Live This Life about Nancy's schizophrenia and troubled adolescence, as well as seeing the ubiquitous Sid and Nancy fictionalization of their strange short lives. So I walked into this doc with pretty low expectations, curious as what it would even be about.

It's a fair representation of the underground pre-punk and punk scene in New York City by the people who lived through it, which is honestly probably the most compelling aspect of Who Killed Nancy? Rather than solving the mystery of the title person's 1978 murder. Let's face it - most of us bought into the story that an angry, mentally ill, and addicted Sid Vicious "accidentally" committed manslaughter in the middle of an argument accompanied by domestic violence.

But now I don't know, there are so many details that never came to light publicly until this documentary was made, apparently. It tracks because it was difficult to solve murders 40-50 years ago compared to today and no one really cared about a couple of "has been" junkies living in the latter days of the Chelsea Hotel.

This is an intriguing murder mystery chocked full of junkies and punk rock stars. A must see!!

This film is structured around the question of who killed Nancy Spungen, companion to Sid Vicious. The weakness of the film is that the filmmakers have not structured the film in a rigorous way to make their case questioning the conventional wisdom on the matter.

The actual effect of this lack of strict focus, is paradoxically, a masterpiece in capturing the character and spirit of both the people involved, and of the music scene that they came from.

Punk was, and is, purposely confrontational, and many punk documentaries are effectively impaled on these clashes; stuck on the 'spikes' of punk, and never really capturing a complete image of either the people or the scene. In setting out to chronicle a death, this film has actually captured that life.

It would probably be foolish to imagine that any film can actually tell you all about punk; who has seen a documentary that actually even had all of the important bands in it? This film is not all of punk by any means, but it is one of the best documentaries to have come out of it, and that is what really matters.

If you are focused on the film from the perspective of the mystery however, this film is still a great success, at least if you would like to make up your own mind. Most films of this sort would have the filmmaker smacking away with remark after remark, all up and down the length of the film, like a cook tenderizing a piece of meat. In this case, it seems like such remarks had to be pasted onto the end of the film, but since both sides of the evidence are presented relatively naturally along the course of the film, the effect is to create overall, an unusually unbiased presentation. This documentary is rough around the edges, but it is great.

This is not as much of a who-did-it as it is a profile of Sid and Nancy. If you take it as that, its very good. I've seen several films that detail their lives, but this one is the best.

Clocking at about 100 minutes, this film has an excellent soundtrack that will take you back to the time of Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols.

After viewing this documentary, you may not know who killed Nancy but you will feel this need to take a shower after being exposed to a lot of seedy people who knew Sid and Nancy at the time of their deaths.

If you are interested in Punk Rock or just looking to pass a couple hours, you'll be pleased with "Who Killed Nancy?"

Director Alan G. Parker, a self-titled Sid Vicious biographer, put together this overlong, scattered pseudo-documentary about '70s British punker and ex-Sex Pistols bassist Vicious and his American girlfriend, groupie Nancy Spungen, who was found dead in 1978 in the New York City hotel room the couple shared, stabbed once with a knife after a long binge of partying and drugs. Although it's her name in the movie's title, Parker hasn't much information on Nancy Spungen--no surprise then that the primary focus here is on Vicious (which probably also aided Parker in getting financing). We do get a shot of Spungen's nice childhood house in Pennsylvania (which Parker then compares to Sid's humble beginnings) and rare interview footage of Sid and Nancy together before the stabbing and Sid's eventual heroin overdose. The rest doesn't amount to much: Sid's arrest, his release on bail of $50,000, evidence at the murder scene unexplored by the police (which Parker obviously feels vindicates Sid), and dead-end interviews with friends and hangers-on who feed on the long-held conspiracy theory that Nancy was murdered by an outsider over a drug-deal gone bad. Newspaper headlines and vintage TV news clips do not a documentary make, yet somehow Parker has managed to stretch this thing out to an interminable 100 minutes (an abbreviated version runs 89 minutes). *1/2 from ****