As this year has been designated the 40th anniversary of punk rock hitting the UK, there’s no surprise that Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy is up for another home cinema release. It’s been on DVD at least three times previously. This new version, though, also comes on Blu-ray, its first outing in the format. The other selling point is a sparkling image restoration that's removed what now seems to have been a layer of murk from the earlier versions.
Sid & Nancy was released to cinemas in 1986 so is, itself, enjoying its 30th anniversary. Seen now, it comes across as hyperventilating cartoon of a film. As the ill-fated friend of Johnny Rotten and final Sex Pistols’ bassist Sid Vicious, the then-unknown Gary Oldman plays a gormless, needy and impressionable cork bobbing along on whatever comes his way.
Fans of minutiae will revel in the film What’s lacking is the real sense of danger to others that Vicious presented: his attacks on journalist Nick Kent, a BBC producer and his threatening other bands with a knife at 1976’s 100 Club punk festival are sidestepped. Chloe Webb’s Nancy Spungen, the American girlfriend who introduced him to heroin, is so toweringly annoying it beggars belief anyone could spend time with her. Nonetheless, as the leads hurtle towards their demise the grim last 20 minutes pack a real punch.
Anachronisms (the Pistols’ audience looks and acts like one gathered for The Exploited rather than one from 1977) and a scrambled chronology are not problems. Feeding the mythology is. And however much Cox’s film is not a celebration, its parodic tone helped set the Vicious persona in stone.
Fans of minutiae will revel in the film. Paradoxically, Vicious's Pistols predecessor Glen Matlock had an active role in recreating the band’s music. The incidental music was supplied by Joe Strummer and The Pogues. Iggy Pop appears for five seconds. Courtney Love has a bit part; considering her subsequent liaison with Kurt Cobain, her presence induces queasiness.
The extras include a short overview on punk from Don Letts, who once again says much that he has before, a reminiscence from cinematographer Roger Deakins (who oversaw the restoration), and an interesting interview with Cox during which he does not acknowledge some of the source material. As scenes dramatise episodes from the pages of Fred and Judy Vermerol’s Sex Pistols: The Inside Story (published 1978) and Deborah Spungen’s And I Don't Want To Live This Life (1983), much is left unsaid.
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