Sid and Nancy

Sid Vicious' position in rock history is legendary. I mean that literally; almost all of it is legend. His reputation as a sneering idol of punk sensibilities and a pillar of the Sex Pistols is undercut by the fact that he was a late addition to the band after their album was released, and he could barely play his instrument in the first place. His reputation is all built on being a sneering, intoxicated idiot that started fights in the middle of his own concerts. That and the hellish whirlwind relationship with Nancy Spungen. I knew the members of the Pistols decried the movie's accuracy, flights of fancy, and romanticism of a self-destructive lifestyle. I didn't go in expecting a thorough biography of this doomed pair, but I was hoping it could at least capture the two parts of their reputation that are real: their toxicity towards each other, and their anarchic nature towards the world around them. It failed on both accounts. It is no fault of the actors themselves. Gary Oldman cannot be bad, period, end of statement, don't ever true to argue. Chloe Webb does a marvelous job as well, embodying Nancy with equal parts childlike enthusiasm, blind naivete, and a reckless disregard for anything and everything around her, including herself. But that's where the positives end. Everything else about this movie is terrible. The direction is atrocious, on both an artistic and a techincal level. When ambient noise in the scene is overpowering the dialogue, or the dialogue itself is muffled to the point of being undecipherable, to the point that I've got to read the Wikipedia plot summary to know what's going on, you've failed in a very simple job. This movie doesn't have any momentum whatsoever; it lurches, clumsily and drunkenly, often falling on its face, a boring repetition of getting hammered, bad performance, fight with Nancy, sex with Nancy, pissing people off, do it all again. You'd think for a movie about punks in 1978, and the Sex Pistols of all people, this movie would have anarchic energy crackling from it like a downed power line, but nope. Even when someone is causing mayhem, it feels restricted, all the chaotic energy smothered out of it. It feels like what squares thought punks looked and acted like, not who they actually were, but they don't want to go all the way for fear of influencing the kids. It's so sanitized, kids having a Nerf war in the backyard have more crazy energy. And then there's how Sid and Nancy are portrayed. Like I said, Sid's reputation as this edgy icon of punk sensibility is overblown. But this movie makes him out to be a gullible, malleable idiot. He doesn't feel like a human being; he feels like a chess piece with a profane talk box. Naturally, that means Nancy is the more proactive of the two, and also, de facto antagonist; her toxicity is a never-ending water faucet. She is a drunken, meth-addled Godzilla, unable to do anything but destroy everything. But she's also every cliched rock 'n' roll girlfriend you've ever heard of; meddlesome, despised by the band, treats her boyfriend like both an unsung artistic genius and a meal ticket. It is as hoary as it is insulting. I'm not saying Nancy didn't have bad qualities, or that Sid wasn't gullible to her charms. This movie doesn't let them have any nuance beyond that. He is the dumbest version of Othello, and she is the crassest version of Iago, only there's no Desdemona here. It is stupid, shrill, and misogynistic, and it makes every moment spent with them agonizing. Nobody will go into this movie rooting for anyone, because anybody who watches this knows how it will end, but this movie presents it as so abrasive and unpleasant, it is difficult to watch from an endurance standpoint. I cannot tell you how many times I checked my phone. I watched it on Plex, which has ad breaks, and I simultaneously relished each one for the respite it allowed, and cursed it for dragging out this interminable slog. Given how much of the real story will forever be shrouded in mystery, it's sad that the only cinematic version of events we have is this. I was expecting a punk Romeo & Juliet. I got something far more depressing: a movie that hated its own subjects.