Love kills in Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy at the Belcourt
Sid and Nancy was a controversial film that told a controversial story about controversial people when it debuted in 1986. Nancy Spungen was found dead from a knife wound in the Chelsea Hotel room she shared with Sid Vicious in New York City, in October of 1978. The infamous English punk rocker was the newly christened lead singer of The Sex Pistols. Spungen was a 20-year-old American from Philadelphia with a history of schizophrenia. She met Vicious when she moved to London after being expelled from the University of Colorado Boulder for buying drugs and stealing. Sid and Nancy were the king and queen of punk rock, but instead of making music they spent most of their time at the Chelsea doing heroin.
There are three main theories about what happened to Nancy: Sid killed her in a drug-addled rage; a drug dealer killed Nancy; Sid and Nancy made a suicide pact gone bust. The couple’s co-dependent life together was rife with domestic abuse, and buying and selling and using hard narcotics are inherently dangerous. Sid and Nancy were both violent and physically self-destructive. Director Alex Cox wrote Sid and Nancy with Abbe Woole, and the pair mostly embrace the suicide theory in their screenplay. But 37 years after the film’s release, and 45 years after Spungen’s death, the movie has outlasted its infamous origins. Audiences can now watch Sid and Nancy as an incendiary love letter of a music movie, delivered by two blazing performances from Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb in the title roles.
This is Gary Oldman’s first feature film. And Sid and Nancy, Prick Up Your Ears (1987) and Rosencrantz & Gildenstern Are Dead (1990) comprise a cinematic trilogy that announced Oldman as the greatest actor of his era. Cox portrays the couple inhabiting a micro-verse: two outsiders, alone together in a world of their own making. Oldman’s Vicious spends most of the film covered in spit, beer, blood and baked beans. Oldman is physically unhinged onstage and in the streets — a bone-thin tornado of leather and spikes, flipping tables, smashing bottles, and bashing his own head into brick walls for the pure, nihilistic joy of breaking things — including himself. Oldman and the script always manage to stop just short of parody, and the result is a movie punctuated with moments of both dumb joy and revolting misery.
Chloe Webb’s Nancy matches Oldman’s intensity. The American actress’s New York accent is one of the film’s most unforgettable elements, and Webb steals whole scenes with classic line readings like, “Never trust a junkie” and “I’ve got my own stuff to do.” Every time I think of this film I can hear Webb’s Nancy haranguing “Sidney!” in a voice like an ice pick down a chalkboard, but it’s her ability to go for broke alongside Oldman that makes their quieter moments so touching and so tragic.
Nancy’s mental health issues, suicide attempts and run-ins with the law estranged her from her family. Sid was kicked out of his home by his drug-addicted mother, and he started squatting in abandoned houses when he was just 16. Drug addiction, domestic abuse, emotional disorders and homelessness are exhaustively portrayed in the film, but not exploited. The great cinematographer Roger Deakins captures all the bleakness with just enough style to remind viewers they’re watching a rock ‘n’ roll film, and Cox’s penchant for balancing the absurd with the romantic is a perfect match for this modern and murderous love story.
If you missed Sid and Nancy’s recent Music City Monday screening at the Belcourt you can stream it for free at watch.plex.tv
Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.