After a May 1986 premiere at Cannes, Alex Cox’s controversial film Sid and Nancy had its hometown showing in London on July 20. As a biopic of the tragic relationship between the Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and his American girlfriend Nancy Spungen, the film earned strongly mixed reactions. But by 2016 it had amassed a cult following despite initial criticisms of its inaccuracies, exaggerations, and even “off-putting” morality.
The film portrayed a dramatization of Sid and Nancy’s descent into drug addiction, depravity, violence, and death. It took on the daunting task of telling their infamous story. From the golden days and decline of the Sex Pistols, to Nancy’s murder in 1978, to Sid’s fatal heroin overdose while on bail in 1979. But much of it was solely for the sake of condemning Sid and Nancy for selling out the punk movement, as Cox saw it.
In his 2008 book X-Films: Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker, Cox recalled being approached by a producer in late 1984 with the idea for a film about Sid and Nancy. Initially, the film would star Madonna and Rupert Everett, and Cox found this to be “a troubling idea indeed.”
He wrote that “The danger was two-fold: 1) the film might get made; and 2) the film would present Vicious and Spungen as exemplars of Punk, rather than sold-out traitors to it.”
Director Alex Cox Wrote ‘Sid And Nancy’ As a Condemnation of Their Depraved, Sell-Out Behavior
Cox started planning his film almost immediately, knowing he had to work fast. He tracked down contemporaries and associates of the Sex Pistols. These included a dominatrix who owned the house the band had lived in for a time, members of their inner circle of fans called The Bromley Contingent, and Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren.
“There was some doubt back then as to whether Sid had really killed Nancy or whether a drug dealer had done it,” Cox recalled in his book. “Over dinner … I remarked ‘Nobody really knows if he killed her, after all.’ McLaren lolled, smiled, and replied, ‘I do,’ at which point his friends jumped up hastily and hustled him away.”
Much later in the production, Cox recalled having to cross-reference his script with his interviews and archival information in front of a team of lawyers. Every line of dialog and scene was verified for accuracy. Or, at least, enough accuracy to avoid lawsuits.
“[Sid and Nancy] involved living, potentially litigious people,” Cox wrote. “So the lawyers were being extra careful. Sid and Nancy were dead, of course, and quite notorious. They probably couldn’t have sued us successfully. But McLaren and the other Sex Pistols, their friends and enemies, Sid’s mother, and Nancy’s family were very much alive. If any of them was depicted in a way that damaged their reputation, they could sue those responsible—not just me, but [production companies] Embassy, and Zenith.”
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But even with this abundance of caution, there were still those who objected to the depictions in the finished film. In his 1994 memoir, John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) criticized the film.
“To me this movie is the lowest form of life,” he wrote. “I honestly believe that it celebrates heroin addiction. It definitely glorifies it at the end when that stupid taxi drives off into the sky. That’s such nonsense … It was so off and ridiculous. It was absurd.”
However, in 2016, Cox admitted that he was “more sympathetic to [John] Lydon’s point of view than ever.” Looking back on the film, he felt that the ending took “a touchy-feely way out.” If he could do it over again, he’d keep things bleak.
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“I wouldn’t have the happy ending, you know, the taxi to heaven stuff, because I think that’s very compromised,” he told Little White Lies in 2016. “It’s sentimental and dishonest, because we were trying to make a film that condemned Sid and Nancy for their decadence. The punk movement was essentially a positive movement that was supposed to be forward-looking. You can’t do that if you’re a junkie rock star in a hotel room.”
Additionally, Cox felt that the sentimental ending overshadowed the point of the film in the first place. The most important scene in the film, he said, was when Sid and Nancy go to the methadone clinic. There, the clinic worker highlights the heart of the film.
“He won’t give them the methadone until he tells them that they’ve completely betrayed the movement and they’ve betrayed themselves,” said Cox. “That was the point of the film, but I think that gets forgotten, and gets undercut by the quasi-happy ending. If I was to remake it, I would end it with Sid dying in a pool of his own vomit.”
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