“Never trust a junkie.”
This was a typical poster on dorm room walls during many a black eyeliner self-discovery phase. Sid and Nancy was a film you’d watch at 17 and become absolutely convinced that love was immolation, that it was supposed to look like two people destroying one another. The movie is messy, loud, nihilistic, and sentimental if you squint hard enough through the smoke. I’ve been there, I know.
Gary Oldman gives a performance that feels possessed. He’s a twitching, gurning, feral disaster who stumbles through his scenes like he forgot there was a camera, and it’s genuinely hard to tell he’s acting. He’s just that good. And Chloe Webb as Nancy is properly nails-on-a-chalkboard abrasive, she’s the runaway train at the story’s heart. No one here is meant to be aspirational, this is addiction, codependency, and disintegration dressed up in leather and smeared lipstick.
Yeah, it gets things wrong. It mythologises Sid, wallpapers over the real Nancy, and it never quite settles on whether it’s a biopic, a cautionary tale, or just 2 hours of tragedy p0rn. But it feels true in the way good alt cinema does, it doesnt have to be accurate to be honest.
Sid and Nancy isn’t offering some grand insight on the whole 70’s punk scene. But part of you, at some point, might have been tempted to crawl into this kind of wreckage to see what it felt like. But then thought better of it.
For those of us who went through a tragically angsty period, or for that generation of sad kids with safety pins in their ears and no exit strategy, this might have seemed like a love story.
A terrible and unforgiving one. -Pop