This has a really really horrible death scene where Nancy fades out in a pool of blood, which makes you feel ill. The way “Sid and Nancy” portrays drug addiction is about as much of a contrast to the way “Rent” portrays the same issue as you could possibly imagine. In “Sid and Nancy”, shooting up with heroin is shown as repulsive and vile and involving all sorts of related moral deprivations that occur when a person is out of control: violence, degradation, bad behaviour and so on. In “Rent”, if you are a drug addict you annoy people by collecting little white bags from strangers when you weren’t supposed to. It doesn’t affect your behaviour or your relationships (except insofar as your relationships include arguments about whether you ought to continue taking drugs or not).

I find this pretty appallingly dishonest, although I am open-minded to the possibility that I am somehow missing the point of “Rent” and reading it wrong (comments welcome). Attitudes to drugs have changed. In the 80s, heroin was regarded as the sordid territory of hopeless sociopaths. Although the writing of “Rent” began in the late 80s, it wasn’t on the stage for another ten years, by which time people’s ideas about drugs had changed. They were a lot more widespread and “respectable”. Heroin chic was on its way. Tougher and wiser people than Sid and Nancy got into hard drugs.

Anyway, “Sid and Nancy” not only leaves you in no doubt that heroin addiction can spiral into serious mental-health decline up to and including semi-accidental death: it actually does so while still creating some kind of sympathy for the characters of Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. They are messed up children, they don’t want to die, they are human beings, and therefore the story is sad as well as pathetic and vile. Gary Oldman’s acting is brilliant, so that Sid comes over as a hopeless loser who doesn’t actually mean any harm, just has all the wrong ideas and very little ability to do any better. Also it’s one of those doomed love stories, where the inadequacies of the partners exacerbate problems that maybe they would have been able to tackle if they had avoided each other, or at least remained further apart (like Romeo and Juliet). Which is impressive, considering.

Also, Courtney Love is in the film, ten years before her own similar tragic story got going, which I find interesting.