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.
Review of Sid and Nancy
