Sid and Nancy
Shockingly, it was the screen debut of Gary Oldman, then a young unknown British actor.
Yet he inhabited the role of Sid Vicious with astonishing immersion–the scowling grin and pasty skin; the glassy-eyed sociopath daze; the way he tossed his body around.
In this unsettling punk drama, director Alex Cox made a Sex Pistols biopic by building it entirely around Sid, a charismatic wastrel, and his American girlfriend Nancy Spungen,
She is played by Chloe Webb as a platinum-blonde junkie vampire who speaks in a screeching whine from hell.
These people were not taken seriously by many. Yet the tawdry movie digs deep into their dirty-syringe desperation, and their genuine love for each other–until the bitter and tragic end.
The movie’s culminating scenes, set in the Chelsea Hotel, are too tough to watch, which might explain the picture’s commercial failure.
Oldman and Webb create a darkly spellbinding couple, showing their obsessions, joys and pains (their lifestyle), and making all too real their ultimate self-destructive insanity.
I would have given him the Best Actor Oscar for Sid and Nancy (a movie Academy voters tend to despise) than the one that he won decades later, as Churchill in the noble and heroic, The Darkest Hour.
