Sid and Nancy

It’s strange that a movie about the band who embod­ied the filth and the fury of the punk move­ment should be a rel­a­tive­ly clean-cut affair. Sure, Gary Old­man (back when Gary Old­man was a kamikaze char­ac­ter actor) brings as much as he can to the role of spot­ty her­bert and Sex Pis­tols’ bassist, Sid Vicious, but there’s some­thing just a lit­tle affect­ed about his turn. The rivers of gob and the tip­sy stum­bling feel too much like a trained actor mim­ic­k­ing a real per­son, and then dialling a spe­cif­ic set of man­ner­isms up to as-yet-untest­ed lev­els. Sure, it’s com­pelling in the same way as watch­ing a drunk man climb a scaf­fold is, but it’s a dis­tanc­ing, revolt­ing per­for­mance, a hor­ror show of self-involved wretched­ness which bor­ders on the inhuman.

His spar­ring part­ner and bleach-blonde lover­girl is Nan­cy Spun­gen (Chloe Webb), poten­tial­ly the most aggres­sive­ly shrill char­ac­ter ever to be cap­tured on film. Her reg­u­lar Noo Yoik shrieks of ​“Sii­i­i­i­i­id!!!” are like nails run­ning down a black­board while a hound-dog yelps in uni­son. It’s quite a feat, as Spun­gen is pre­sent­ed as almost whol­ly unpleas­ant from the very first scene where she’s seen as will­ing to do any­thing it takes for some drug mon­ey. Unlik­able though she may be, there’s the sense that direc­tor Alex Cox knows what he’s doing, and it thus makes their sor­did, tac­tile love affair seem rather mirac­u­lous. Like a Bon­nie and Clyde with­out the methadone instead of Tom­my guns.

Though the film offers a rudi­men­ta­ry his­to­ry of the band, its focus remains on the title char­ac­ters as they grav­i­tate away from the booze-soaked tour cir­cuit and to a room in the Chelsea Hotel where they allow them­selves to dis­in­te­grate. There are no scenes of high dra­ma when Sid departs from the band, as it’s felt by his entourage that he’s bare­ly a func­tion­ing human and has long tak­en off down the high­way to hell. The film asks: what if two such out­casts were to come together?

There is a gen­uine fond­ness for the peri­od recre­ation and the punk scene itself, but where’ Cox’s film is best is as a hushed tale of lethar­gic amour fou. Those short bursts where the inces­sant scream­ing and abuse come to a nat­ur­al pause, and the pair talk to each oth­er in a whis­per, are the film’s strongest scenes. The loud-qui­et-loud dynam­ic also keeps with the dys­pep­tic spir­it of punk music itself. It’s a sol­id film, and def­i­nite­ly inter­est­ing as biog­ra­phy. Yet it’s the sequences where Cox allows his mind to wan­der – such as a dream sequence where Sid sings My Way and blast holes in the applaud­ing audi­ence – where the film comes into its own.