Sid and Nancy

Sid and Nancy (also known as Sid and Nancy: Love Kills) is a 1986 British biographical film directed by Alex Cox, co-written with Abbe Wool, and starring Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb. The film portrays the life of Sid Vicious, bassist of the punk rock band the Sex Pistols, and his destructive relationship with girlfriend Nancy Spungen. The film also features supporting performances from David Hayman, Xander Berkeley, and Courtney Love.

The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1986, and was released theatrically in the United States in November of that same year. Although it failed to recoup its production budget at the box office, the film was received positively by most critics and developed a cult following.

Plot
On 12 October 1978, police are summoned to the Hotel Chelsea in New York City, where they find Nancy Spungen dead. Her boyfriend, Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious, is taken into custody. Sid is driven to a police station and told to describe what happened.

A little more than a year earlier, in 1977, close friends and band members Sid and Johnny Rotten meet Nancy, a heroin-addicted American groupie who had come to London to bed the Sex Pistols. Sid dismisses her at first, as her intentions are obvious, but begins dating her after feeling sympathy for the rejection she faces from fellow punk performers. The two swiftly bond over heroin use, and it is implied that Nancy introduces Sid to the drug.

Sid and Nancy fall deeply in love, but their self-destructive, drug-fueled relationship frays Sid's relationship with the rest of the band. Nancy is distraught when Sid departs on a month-long American tour without her. The tour is notably disastrous, with Sid strung out of his mind, often drunk or on methamphetamine, and physically violent. Phoebe, Sid's friend and road manager, unsuccessfully attempts to help him stop drinking. Meanwhile, Nancy remains in London, staying with her friend Linda, a dominatrix. Although several of Sid's friends and acquaintances warn him of Nancy's devastating effect on his life, Sid stubbornly ignores these warnings. On 17 January 1978, in the midst of the group's American tour, the band breaks up.

Sid reunites with Nancy in New York City, and he attempts to start a solo career with Nancy as his manager. The two visit Paris to begin recording sessions, but the trip is unfruitful. Sid is quickly dismissed in the music industry as a has-been, and he and Nancy descend deeper into heroin addiction; Nancy also begins suffering from severe depression, and the couple eventually make a suicide pact. Nancy brings Sid to Philadelphia to meet her family, who are horrified by the couple's reckless behavior and physical state. Sid and Nancy return to New York and settle in the Hotel Chelsea, where they live in squalor and depend on opiates supplied by their drug dealer, Bowery Snax.

Their love affair ends tragically one night when, during an argument in which Sid announces his plans to stop using heroin and return to England to restart his life, a suicidal Nancy begs him to kill her. She attacks him and they fight in a drug-induced haze, leading to him stabbing her, although whether it was intentional is left to interpretation. They fall asleep and later Nancy awakes and stumbles into the bathroom, where she collapses and dies, calling Sid for help. Sid is bailed out temporarily by his mother, who is also a heroin addict. After Sid wanders to a restaurant, some street kids convince him to dance with them. A taxi appears and picks Sid up, and he believes he finds Nancy alive in the back seat. The two embrace as the cab drives off.

A postscript says that Vicious died of a heroin overdose, and lastly reads: "R.I.P. Nancy and Sid."

Development
The idea for the film began with a 1980 screenplay entitled 'Too Kool to Die'; a fictional story inspired by Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious, featuring refences to current English politics which Cox realised would make it unlikely to be financed. Four years later, after his directorial debut with Repo Man, Cox heard rumour of the possibility of a Hollywood film documenting the relationship of Spungen and Vicious, with Madonna and Rupert Everett in the lead roles - "For anyone who had been vaguely into the Punk movement, this was a troubling idea indeed" Cox wrote in his 2008 autobiography, and it motivated him to re-work his earlier script. “I felt an obligation to struggle against that project, fearing it would be even worse than mine.”

Cox's film, originally titled Love Kills, is based on the mutually destructive, drug and sex filled relationship between Sid and Nancy. Nancy's parents, Deborah and Frank Spungen, wanted no part in a film depicting their child's death. Sid's mother, Anne Beverley, initially tried to prevent the film from being made, but after meeting with director Cox decided to help the production, even lending Vicious' own heavy metal chain and padlock for Oldman to wear in the film. Some of the supporting characters are composites, invented to streamline the plot.

Work on the film was almost complete when the financers received a letter from a party claiming to own the title 'Love Kills' and threatening legal action. Cox reluctantly changed it at lawyers' insistence, later describing the title 'Sid and Nancy' as "bland". He apparently did like the title given the Mexican video version; 'Two Lives Destroyed by Drugs'.

Casting
According to director Cox, he had originally considered Daniel Day-Lewis for the part of Sid Vicious; however, Cox offered Oldman the part of Vicious after seeing him play the lead role of Scopey in a 1984 production of Edward Bond's The Pope's Wedding. Oldman twice turned down the role before accepting it, because, in his own words: "I wasn't really that interested in Sid Vicious and the punk movement. I'd never followed it. It wasn't something that interested me. The script I felt was banal and 'who cares' and 'why bother' and all of that. And I was a little bit sort-of with my nose in the air and sort-of thinking 'well the theatre – so much more superior' and all of that." He reconsidered based on the salary and the urging of his agent. - "My agent at the time put a lot of pressure and bullied me into it", according to an Oldman interview, included in an early DVD version of the film. He lost weight to play the emaciated Vicious by eating nothing but "steamed fish and lots of melon", and was briefly hospitalised when he lost too much. Oldman later dismissed his performance, saying: "I don't think I played Sid Vicious very well".

Courtney Love rang co-writer Abbe Wool and recorded a video audition for the role of Spungen. Cox was impressed by Love's audition, but has said the film's investors insisted on an experienced actress for the co-leading role. Therefore, instead, Cox wrote the minor role of Gretchen, one of Sid and Nancy's New York junkie friends, specifically for her benefit. Cox would later cast Love as one of the leads in Straight to Hell (1987). Chloe Webb, who had appeared in several small television roles at the time, was instead cast in the role of Spungen.

In his 2007 autobiography, Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash revealed that the casting director hired all five members of Guns N' Roses as extras for a club scene, having coincidentally scouted them in different locations without their knowledge. He said "all of us showed up to the first day of casting, like 'Hey...what are you doing here?'" However, Slash was the only one in the group to stay for the entire shoot.

Webb and Oldman improvised the dialogue heard in the scene leading up to Spungen's death but based it on interviews and other materials available to them. The stabbing scene is fictionalized and based only on conjecture. Cox told the NME: "We wanted to make the film not just about Sid Vicious and punk rock, but as an anti-drugs statement, to show the degradation caused to various people is not at all glamorous."

The original music is by Pray for Rain, Joe Strummer, and The Pogues. A track by Tears for Fears ("Swords and Knives") was also recorded for the film but was rejected by the filmmakers for not being "punk" enough. The track later appeared on the band's Seeds of Love album in 1989.

Prominent musicians made appearances in the film including Circle Jerks, Love, Iggy Pop, Nico and Edward Tudor-Pole of Tenpole Tudor.

Filming
The film was primarily shot in London and New York City, though additional photography (particularly the sequences of the Sex Pistols' North American tour) was completed in Los Angeles and El Centro, California.

Critical reception
From the 65 reviews collected by review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film received an overall approval rating of 88%, with the consensus: "Visceral, energetic, and often very sad, Sid & Nancy is also a surprisingly touching love story, and Gary Oldman is outstanding as the late punk rock icon Sid Vicious." Roger Ebert gave Sid and Nancy four-out-of-four in his review for The Chicago Sun-Times, writing that Cox and his crew "pull off the neat trick of creating a movie full of noise and fury, and telling a meticulous story right in the middle of it." Appearing on The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers, Ebert said, to agreement from Rivers and applause from the audience, that Oldman "definitely won't be [Oscar] nominated – and should be", this being for the reason that "Hollywood will not nominate an actor for portraying a creep, no matter how good the performance is". In a subsequent article on Oldman, Ebert referred to the movie's titular couple as "punk rock's Romeo and Juliet."

In his book Sid Vicious: Rock N' Roll Star, Malcolm Butt describes Webb's performance as Spungen as "intense, powerful, and most important of all, believable." Oldman's portrayal of Vicious was ranked #62 in Premiere magazine's "100 Greatest Performances of All Time". Uncut magazine ranked Gary Oldman as #8 in its "10 Best actors in rockin' roles" list, describing his portrayal as a "hugely sympathetic reading of the punk figurehead as a lost and bewildered manchild." In 2011, Total Film said of the performance: "It's an early high point in Oldman's varied career that showed just what the young actor was made of. Playing the part of an icon known and beloved by many comes with its own demands and risks, but Oldman more than rises to the challenge, completely transforming into the troubled punk bassist." The magazine described Oldman's rendition of "My Way" as "fantastic – [it] might even be better than Sid's original version." In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked Sid and Nancy as the third-best rock movie ever made, and in 2014, ShortList named it the ninth-greatest music biopic of all time.

Not all reviews of the film were positive. Leslie Halliwell reiterated a line from a review that appeared in Sight & Sound: "Relentlessly whingeing performances and a lengthy slide into drugs, degradation and death make this a solemnly off-putting moral tract."

Andrew Schofield was ranked #1 in Uncut magazine's "10 Worst actors in rockin' roles", which described his performance as Sex Pistols lead singer Johnny Rotten (real name John Lydon) as a "short-arse Scouse Bleasdale regular never once looking like he means it". Commentary on the Criterion DVD dismisses the film's portrayal of Lydon as wholly inaccurate. Paul Simonon of The Clash also criticised the movie for portraying Lydon as "some sort of fat, bean-slurping idiot."

Although not a box office success (generating $2,826,523 in the U.S. on a $4 million budget), Sid and Nancy has become a cult hit; Yahoo! Movies described the film as a "poignant and uncompromising cult classic".

John Lydon's reaction
Lydon commented on the film in his 1994 autobiography, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs:

"I cannot understand why anyone would want to put out a movie like Sid and Nancy and not bother to speak to me; Alex Cox, the director, didn't. He used as his point of reference – of all the people on this earth – Joe Strummer! That guttural singer from The Clash? What the fuck did he know about Sid and Nancy? That's probably all he could find, which was really scraping the bottom of the barrel. The only time Alex Cox made any approach toward me was when he sent the chap who was playing me over to New York where I was. This actor told me he wanted to talk about the script. During the two days he was there, he told me that the film had already been completed. The whole thing was a sham. It was a ploy to get my name used in connection with the film, in order to support it.

To me this movie is the lowest form of life. I honestly believe that it celebrates heroin addiction. It definitely glorifies it at the end when that stupid taxi drives off into the sky. That's such nonsense... It was so off and ridiculous. It was absurd. Champagne and baked beans for breakfast? Sorry. I don't drink champagne. He didn't even speak like me. He had a Scouse accent. Worse, there's a slur implied in the movie that I was jealous of Nancy, which I find particularly loathsome. There is that implication that I feel was definitely put there. I guess that's Alex Cox showing his middle class twittery. It's all too glib, it's all too easy."

Strummer claimed to have met with Alex Cox for the first time after the completion of the film, at a wrap party, but this is not entirely accurate. The wrap party was the conclusion of the London phase of the filming, which was followed by filming in Los Angeles and New York City, performed by a largely different crew. The pair's meeting involved discussion over soundtrack work for the film, not the film's script.

In a later interview, Lydon was asked the question, "Did the movie get anything right?" to which he replied: "Maybe the name Sid." Cox's attitude toward his subjects was negative; one of the reasons he was attracted to the project was that he was afraid that if someone else made it, it would portray its subjects as "real exemplars of Punk, rather than sold-out traitors to it." He acknowledged that Lydon's hatred of the movie was "understandable, given that it was based on incidents from his life and centred around one of his friends." Lydon claimed that drummer Paul Cook was more upset over the movie than he was, though the latter has not spoken publicly about it. In a 1987 interview on The Late Show when asked by interviewer Elayne Boosler about his thoughts on the movie, guitarist Steve Jones said: "For someone who didn't know anything about the Sex Pistols I guess it was a good way of describing it, but it's really hard for me to be judgemental of it because I was actually there at the time. I mean I didn’t like the guy who played me. […] The only thing I liked about it was the way they portrayed where and how drugs take you. That was the best thing I thought about the movie”.

In Cox's own, 2008, autobiography he refuted Lydon's claim about not meeting before the film, stating that they enjoyed a 90-minute, alcohol-fuelled, discussion about the script, who should play 'Johnny Rotten', and other aspects of production. Cox stated that Andrew Schofield (who played Lydon in the film) also met with Lydon; and when Lydon noticed Schofield was a Liverpudlian, rather than a Londoner like himself, he encouraged Schofield to play the part as a Scouser, which Cox took as a sign that they agreed it would be better to portray a more fictionalised version of the characters, rather than a strictly accurate re-telling of facts. Cox said he then offered the role to Schofield the following day. He suggested that Lydon's alcohol consumption at the meeting could explain why Lydon did not recall the event.

Soundtrack
The official soundtrack contains no songs by either the Sex Pistols or Sid Vicious. Much of the film's soundtrack (as opposed to soundtrack album) was composed by Dan Wool (of Pray for Rain) and Joe Strummer, who was contractually limited to contribute only two songs. Strummer continued to contribute more (unpaid) work because of his interest in the project and composing for film in general. This additional material was credited to fictitious bands in the credits, so as to keep Strummer's label, Epic Records, from knowing what he had done. Another large portion of the music was composed by The Pogues.

Home media
Sid and Nancy was first released on DVD by The Criterion Collection in the late 1990s; this version has since gone out of print. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (the video distributor of the catalog of Embassy Pictures, which released the film on VHS) released the film on DVD in 2000. The Criterion Collection released the film on Blu-ray and DVD on 24 August 2017.