Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
January 1978. After their success in England, the punk rock band Sex Pistols venture out on their tour of the southern United States. Temperamental bassist Sid Vicious is forced by his band mates to travel without his troubled girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, who will meet him in New York. When the band breaks up and Sid begins his solo career in a hostile city, the turbulent couple definitely falls into the depths of drug addiction.
Sid and Nancy benefits enormously from Gary Oldman's ferocious, committed performance as Sid Vicious — one of the defining rock-star portrayals in cinema — matched by Chloe Webb's raw, abrasive Nancy. Alex Cox brings a grimy, punk-inflected visual sensibility that suits the material perfectly, though the cinematography is functional rather than visually transcendent. The plot is episodic and deliberately chaotic, mirroring its subjects' lives, but can feel shapeless and repetitive in its middle section. Where the film truly stands out is in its novelty: Cox's unflinching, non-glamorizing lens on punk subculture and co-dependent self-destruction felt genuinely singular in 1986 and still does — it refuses sentimentality while somehow remaining emotionally devastating. The ending, depicting the Chelsea Hotel tragedy and its dreamlike aftermath, is haunting and appropriately ambiguous, though it opts for a strange fantasy coda that divides opinion.