Who Killed Nancy?

"Just another dead junkie" - the laconic verdict of the New York police, who seemed not too interested in six lots of fingerprints around the walls, all of them belonging to known felons, and who simply charged Sid Vicious with the drug-fuelled murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen.

To the weird cast of interviewees who drive this sordid narrative, that is a vile slur on the sensitive and caring Sid of their increasingly dim and distorted memories. But if you die at 21, you soon morph into some kind of martyr-legend, so we are supposed to keep a straight face while the two of them are seriously compared to Romeo and Juliet. Near the beginning, a voice-over laments "Underneath that exterior, there was a really nice guy." Further in, we catch an example of this niceness, when he tortures and strangles a cat, which then has the impudence to release bodily fluids in its death-throes.

Sid's own death is given a lot too much prominence, considering that it is technically off-topic, having occurred a few months after Nancy's, and this is a sign of the shapeless direction of the film. It is mainly an impressionist picture of the Sid and Nancy story, showing that she was effectively murdered not by a person but by a particular culture, where the decencies are ridiculed, crime and debauchery glamorised, and all limits and restraints shoved aside. Significantly, the film is often padded-out with blurred images of slow-moving shadow-figures of uncertain gender, just drifting about in some limbo.

That is at least symbolic of the chaotic last months of their life together, holed-up in Manhattan's Chelsea Hotel, following the break-up of the Sex Pistols. The Chelsea, as presented, takes bohemianism to giddy heights - dealers everywhere, little groups meeting on the stairs, total strangers wandering in and out of rooms.

It may sound like a schoolboy's dream, this life of non-stop hedonism, but nobody could have called Sid and Nancy a happy couple. If the film reveals anything, it is just how well-earned was the label 'Nauseating Nancy'. Superficially, you could start to find her vaguely attractive in the pop-eyed Molly Parkin style, but a closer look reveals a terrifying madness. Women loathed her piercing voice, and just wanted to get away. And although she claimed she would make a good manager for Sid, that was not too likely, considering her habit of dropping banknotes all over the reception area without noticing. Indeed, some say it was a particular pile of banknotes, found missing from their room, that pointed to the killer, supposedly a mysterious gay dealer who thought he'd been swindled.

But any attempt to explain it in terms of likelihood or logic is doomed, against the general background of narcotic blundering about that clearly left Nancy bleeding to death, slumped awkwardly on that bathroom floor. 'Who Cares Who Killed Nancy?' might have been a better title. The cops knew what they were talking about when they said they had better things to do.

I've long outgrown the phase of my life when I was deeply fascinated by Sid and Nancy but I have read Nancy's mother's biography And I Don't Want to Live This Life about Nancy's schizophrenia and troubled adolescence, as well as seeing the ubiquitous Sid and Nancy fictionalization of their strange short lives. So I walked into this doc with pretty low expectations, curious as what it would even be about.

It's a fair representation of the underground pre-punk and punk scene in New York City by the people who lived through it, which is honestly probably the most compelling aspect of Who Killed Nancy? Rather than solving the mystery of the title person's 1978 murder. Let's face it - most of us bought into the story that an angry, mentally ill, and addicted Sid Vicious "accidentally" committed manslaughter in the middle of an argument accompanied by domestic violence.

But now I don't know, there are so many details that never came to light publicly until this documentary was made, apparently. It tracks because it was difficult to solve murders 40-50 years ago compared to today and no one really cared about a couple of "has been" junkies living in the latter days of the Chelsea Hotel.

Director Alan G. Parker, a self-titled Sid Vicious biographer, put together this overlong, scattered pseudo-documentary about '70s British punker and ex-Sex Pistols bassist Vicious and his American girlfriend, groupie Nancy Spungen, who was found dead in 1978 in the New York City hotel room the couple shared, stabbed once with a knife after a long binge of partying and drugs. Although it's her name in the movie's title, Parker hasn't much information on Nancy Spungen--no surprise then that the primary focus here is on Vicious (which probably also aided Parker in getting financing). We do get a shot of Spungen's nice childhood house in Pennsylvania (which Parker then compares to Sid's humble beginnings) and rare interview footage of Sid and Nancy together before the stabbing and Sid's eventual heroin overdose. The rest doesn't amount to much: Sid's arrest, his release on bail of $50,000, evidence at the murder scene unexplored by the police (which Parker obviously feels vindicates Sid), and dead-end interviews with friends and hangers-on who feed on the long-held conspiracy theory that Nancy was murdered by an outsider over a drug-deal gone bad. Newspaper headlines and vintage TV news clips do not a documentary make, yet somehow Parker has managed to stretch this thing out to an interminable 100 minutes (an abbreviated version runs 89 minutes). *1/2 from ****

This is not as much of a who-did-it as it is a profile of Sid and Nancy. If you take it as that, its very good. I've seen several films that detail their lives, but this one is the best.

Clocking at about 100 minutes, this film has an excellent soundtrack that will take you back to the time of Sid Vicious and the Sex Pistols.

After viewing this documentary, you may not know who killed Nancy but you will feel this need to take a shower after being exposed to a lot of seedy people who knew Sid and Nancy at the time of their deaths.

If you are interested in Punk Rock or just looking to pass a couple hours, you'll be pleased with "Who Killed Nancy?"

This film is structured around the question of who killed Nancy Spungen, companion to Sid Vicious. The weakness of the film is that the filmmakers have not structured the film in a rigorous way to make their case questioning the conventional wisdom on the matter.

The actual effect of this lack of strict focus, is paradoxically, a masterpiece in capturing the character and spirit of both the people involved, and of the music scene that they came from.

Punk was, and is, purposely confrontational, and many punk documentaries are effectively impaled on these clashes; stuck on the 'spikes' of punk, and never really capturing a complete image of either the people or the scene. In setting out to chronicle a death, this film has actually captured that life.

It would probably be foolish to imagine that any film can actually tell you all about punk; who has seen a documentary that actually even had all of the important bands in it? This film is not all of punk by any means, but it is one of the best documentaries to have come out of it, and that is what really matters.

If you are focused on the film from the perspective of the mystery however, this film is still a great success, at least if you would like to make up your own mind. Most films of this sort would have the filmmaker smacking away with remark after remark, all up and down the length of the film, like a cook tenderizing a piece of meat. In this case, it seems like such remarks had to be pasted onto the end of the film, but since both sides of the evidence are presented relatively naturally along the course of the film, the effect is to create overall, an unusually unbiased presentation. This documentary is rough around the edges, but it is great.