Reseñas de la crítica

It's a timely reminder of just how much the dangerous idea of punk has been defanged as it has been appropriated into the mainstream. Fascinating as a time capsule and as a showcase for the early work of the great cinematographer Roger Deakins, this love triangle between Sid, Nancy and the heroin that destroyed them both remains a gruellingly tough watch.

There is a genuine fondness for the period recreation and the punk scene itself, but where' Cox's film is best is as a hushed tale of lethargic amour fou. Those short bursts where the incessant screaming and abuse come to a natural pause, and the pair talk to each other in a whisper, are the film's strongest scenes.

In SID AND NANCY, Alex Cox discovers an oft-imitated, never-equaled recipe for the rock biopic: two parts THIS IS SPINAL TAP and one part PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK. In retrospect, it took balls (or callous indifference) to make a slapstick parody out of the tragedy of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, whose bodies had hardly been in the ground for five years when production began. But Cox's tragicomedy is so good that it's hard to fault him for it.

By refusing to reduce itself to a rehashed Sex Pistols "greatest hits" parade, Sid & Nancy fortuitously sidesteps one of the biggest pitfalls of the musical biopic, examining events instead with an eye for telling detail and a healthy sense of absurdist humor that's evident in even the bleakest scenes. Cox welds improvisatory looseness and a shabby-chic veracity with flights of fancy and off-the-cuff surrealism.

Heroic effort nonetheless, with the film gaining power as it moves away from the pro forma biopic scene-setting of the first couple reels (Lydon gets a particularly raw deal) and settles into the duo's toxic codependency. That they were also junkies inevitably means a certain amount of tiresome wheel-spinning—all drug addicts are tedious in exactly the same way; only options are bore us or lie—but Cox counters with increasing surrealism.

It could easily have been just another rock biopic. Instead, through the use of fantasy-tinged reenactments (favoring the surreal in lieu of the straightforward), Cox transforms this gritty tabloid story into something deeper. It's a perfect example of finding truth through fictionalization.

Like Repo Man, Sid and Nancy has a remarkable richness of texture: everything from ratty t-shirts to background graffiti looks right. Moreover, Cox elicits very strong performances from his cast, most notably from a young Gary Oldman (but not the awful Andrew Schofield performance as Lydon), and continues his ability to bring together sharp cinematography, riveting underground music and subversive political commentary.

Certainly Sid & Nancy has improved with time, or maybe it is only now that we can strip away the problems of the biopic form to distill the essence of what is on offer here: an encapsulation of the joyous chaos that British Punk let loose; a disquisition on how black humour turns into black self-destruction; a love story in the oldest sense— as archetypal and star-crossed as Romeo and Juliet. When Sid says, "I couldn't live without you," it is no spooning cliché but a deadly statement of intent.

It’s a triumph of tone: the note it consistently strikes throughout is one that manages simultaneously to both play up the Sid and Nancy story (for laughs and even romance), but also put it in a dark, entirely anti-nostalgic perspective.

A movie that features head-bashings, drug overdoses, stabbings and a more-or-less constant round of pointless, stupid violence, and yet its most prominent quality is its sweetness. This is a love story--an unlikely, perverse, disturbing love story, but a genuine one.

For all the furious acting out on view, Alex Cox's 1986 feature about rock-scene burnouts Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen (Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb) seems a study in contemporary asceticism; their lacerating pursuit of subcultural purity couldn't be more thorough if undertaken in a monk's cell. Cox ascribes too much innocence to the suicidal pair, but his own savage innocence (a clever naif disguise) provides a lot of rough-edged formal benefits.