I first saw Sid & Nancy when I was fifteen years old at the Polar Theater in Anchorage, Alaska. These were the early days of my punk rock journey; a journey that began several months prior when a friend’s older brother turned me on to The Damned by the Plasmatics. An itch I didn’t even know I had was scratched on that day. Soon after, I caught a community radio broadcast out of the Matanuska Valley and heard the Dead Kennedy’s for the very first time.
MTV Get Off the Air.
That was it man. I was in. Hook, line, and sinker.
April showers bring May flowers and soon I was off to discover The Misfits, The Ramones, 7 Seconds, Social Distortion, Black Flag and, of course, the Sex Pistols. Lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my!
In the mid-eighties, punk rock in Alaska was hard to come by. The pre-internet Last Frontier was a world of mail order – sending away for obscure magazines and indie mailing lists, sending out hundreds of self-addressed stamped envelopes in hopes of a reply. To have a punk rock movie delivered straight to the local theater – it was glorious.
I caught the seven o’clock showing of Sid & Nancy that night. I went alone, as I often did in those days. I watched it in a mostly empty theater. (The best kind of theater in my opinion, but I digress.) It was love at first sight. When I exited the theater a couple of hours later, I found the lobby occupied by every established punk rocker in town. The cool kids. They had all shown up for the nine o’clock show. Foiled!
I’m sure they dug it too, Sid & Nancy is as fine a motion picture as you will ever experience.
Critics are always falling over themselves praising Gary Oldman’s portrayal of Sid Vicious. You’ll get no argument here – the man played a wax statue to perfection in those opening scenes – though oddly enough Oldman himself didn’t particularly care for the role. For my money though, it was Chloe Webb’s portrayal of Nancy Spungen that really shined. By all accounts Nancy was an amazingly disturbed individual. (See also: And I Don’t Want to Live this Life written by her mother, Deborah Spungen.) Disturbed since birth as the song goes. Toss heroin addiction to the mix and you have an emotional whirlwind of Looney Tunes proportions. Chloe nailed it to a T.
Sid & Nancy had way too much influence over my life back in the day.
I foolishly took this movie as an ode to love eternal, the blueprint from which to build my house. And I did, one dysfunctional relationship to another. I was young and naïve, and it took years to shake that. I still say it’s a good love story, despite its most obvious and fatal flaws. But a blueprint it ain’t.
I always hoped that Alex Cox would have his Cronenberg moment, ala The Fly. Something that would just blow people out of the water and let the world know just how great he was. But it never happened.
Sid & Nancy was the first Criterion Collection release I ever purchased. One of my first eBay transactions as well. I’ve got history with this flick.
Memories.
And to hell with Gary Oldman if he doesn’t like it.
(Just kidding Mr. Oldman, sir. I loved you as Sirius Black.)