A few months ago, I noticed the 2022 FX show Pistol floating around Amazon Prime. I love punk and Danny Boyle (he directed every episode), so naturally I enjoyed it. Adapted primarily from guitarist Steve Jones’ autobiography, the show was criticized for falling into typical biopic pitfalls, overexplaining and simplifying events. Regardless, I loved the performances, the tone, and the frenetic sound and visual style of the show. It’s everything I could want in a Sex Pistols biopic.
Sid and Nancy is everything I don’t want in a Sex Pistols biopic.
Along with Pistol, I’ve been reading Jon Savage’s 1991 book England’s Dreaming about the rise of the Sex Pistols and English punk. So I have an okay handle on the Pistols’ story, and honestly, learning about the band has only diminished my opinion of Sid Vicious.
Sid Vicious might be the most striking personification of punk there’s ever been. That being said, he had little to offer as a musician, was a hardcore junkie, and was, by many accounts, a shitty person. Really, he’s the last person we should be making a movie about.
I get it. There’s a doomed young romance angle to Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen that’s compelling. Two poster children of an underground movement who never found their way out of it. Nancy’s unsolved stabbing death at age 20 was followed by Sid Vicious’ death from a heroin overdose less than four months later. Did he kill her? Was his overdose an escape from facing murder charges? If you love crime stories, it’s a fascinating footnote in the history of rock ‘n roll.
That being said, the last thing anyone needed was for these two to be canonized in a movie as rock-and-roll martyrs. For one, I think it overshadows and demeans the band’s accomplishments. And two, what are we really celebrating here?
Now we could have gotten a much worse telling of this story. Rumors swirled in the early ’80s about a Hollywood Sid and Nancy movie starring Rupert Everett and Madonna. That motivated writer-director Alex Cox and co-writer Abbe Wool to develop a script that paid tribute to punk. And though I’ve already said I’m uninterested in this movie on principle, I do think Cox captures the vibe of punk well, showing these rockers and groupies drifting aimlessly through a world of their own creation, a world of anarchy.
The film is told through Sid’s (Gary Oldman) point of view, so it never goes too deep into the music. The Pistols’ first and only studio album was recorded mostly without Sid, and he was only in the band from February 1977 to January 1978. We see bits of the band’s infamous River Thames boat gig and their disastrous tour of the American South, but all of that takes a back seat to Sid and Nancy’s tragic “love story.”
What kind of love story? You know, they scream at each other, do drugs, and occasionally watch TV. It would be more engaging if either of these people, as portrayed in the film, were the slightest bit charismatic. Gary Oldman gives a strong performance, but whenever he shows up, all I want to do is punch him in the face. Chloë Webb’s Nancy is equally insufferable, berating Sid in her thick Philly accent. What did these people even like about each other? I’m not sure, other than their shared appetite for self-destruction.
At this point, you might be asking, “Well then, why did you give this film three stars?” Because despite being a story that didn’t need to be told about deeply unsavory people, it’s an incredibly well-made film on a technical level. Legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins shoots the whole film like a dream, and I loved the moody soundtrack by Joe Strummer, Pray for Rain, and the Pogues.
This was also Gary Oldman’s breakout. It’s obvious he’s a star, delivering a bombastic performance that embodies punk. If you looked up “punk” in the dictionary, it would be his picture. Is that performance enough to justify this film’s existence? Maybe. Maybe the story of punk should be told this way, as the story of an angry young musician who feels isolated from the world and then just dies. I mean, what’s more punk than having no future?