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Premiering 40 Years Ago Today, Punk’s Most Tragic Love Story Came To the Big Screen

Sid and Nancy took on the daunting task of portraying the depravity, drug addiction, and death of punk’s infamous couple.

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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........

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