Sid and Nancy

A few months back, TCM did a spotlight on rock and roll in the movies, and one of the movies profiled was Sid and Nancy. Not having seen it before, I decided to record it so I could watch it and do a review here.

Now, I'm not particularly into the punk rock scene, but I did know that Sid Vicious (Gary Oldman in an early role) was one of the main members of the British punk rock band the Sex Pistols, and that he'd died of a drug overdose. The movie opens up a few months before Sid's death, with the death of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen (Chloe Webb) in the residential hotel in New York where the two of them were living. The police are called, and in flashback, Sid tells the story.

Sid and his friends were the Sex Pistols, of course, while Nancy was an American groupie who was a fan of the Sex Pistols and came to London specifically to meet them. Everybody else Nancy meets treats her like crap, so Sid decides to show some sympathy for her, which is how they became romantically involved. It's a volatile relationship, as the two of them start using drugs together; how much they had done separately before meeting I have no idea. But their drug use makes them even nastier and more violent to each other and pretty much everyone around them.

It also screws up the Sex Pistols' US tour and causes a split in the band, with Sid remaining with Nancy after the breakup. Meeting Nancy's family doesn't help, and the two continue on a spiral downward until Nancy's death, followed a few months later by Sid's overdose.

I found it a bit hard to do a review on Sid and Nancy, largely because to me it feel as if there wasn't much plot, and what there isn't can be a bit confusing at times, as it's hard to tell if the story is linear. Much of the movie feels like two hours of two really unlikeable people going at it, although at least they didn't hurt people around them to the extent Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor did in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. While watching, I also though of the documentary Amy, which is also about a person whose story could have been difficult to warm up to. But the documentarians behind Amy definitely succeeded in doing so, while Sid and Nancy leaves us with two very unsympathetic characters.

Perhaps that's by design. In any case, Oldman and Webb both give excellent performances as the title characters, and those who are more into punk rock than I ever was will probably find the story much more interesting. And as always, watch and judge for yourself. It's not that I didn't like the movie so much as it's one of those that really left me cold, much like A Clockwork Orange.