Sid and Nancy

Great fun, providing you don’t take it as historical fact. Gary Oldman is astonishing, totally inhabiting the character of Sid Vicious, the girl playing Nancy Spungen is totally convincing and while it doesn’t take many of his interviews to realise that he’s not like that in real life at all, the guy playing Johnny Rotten does a very good job of making the character memorable in the little screentime he gets. Strange, though, remembering the film was made less than a decade after the events that inspired it. Playing around liberally with true events (putting Sid on The Today Show, for example) and making characters, events and settings much bigger and bolder and more easily digestible works well for telling a story, though, and the glamorous tragedy told here is a superb fairly story. Watching these total fuck-ups’ sordid existence is deeply compelling, and despite their being so utterly trapped and fettered, their impression of freedom, their total naivety and obliviousness is in many ways enviable. After all, a lot of people want to be Sid Vicious, and a lot of people want to tame someone just like him. Not me, but I can’t deny that a human wreck can look terribly, terrifyingly beautiful.