Cox himself plays a mysterious old man who shows up in an 1890 border town. It's another punk-absurdist Sunday-school lesson from the maker of "Sid and Nancy" and "Repo Man" — a director who should have been great. Cox crowdfunded the film with a Kickstarter campaign, and it’s yet another of his arid didactic put-on Westerns.
This one stars Cox himself as a mysterious and formidable old man in an undertaker’s suit and parson’s hat who wanders into an Arizona border town in 1890 to gather the names of dead Mexican laborers. But it’s one that inspires me to imagine — as every Alex Cox movie does — the glory of what might have been. If I were asked to make a list of all the fantastic movie directors who never lived up to their promise, the No. 1 person on that list would be Alex Cox.
This November, it will be 40 years since the release of “Sid and Nancy,” which I still think is one of the greatest movies ever made. It’s the greatest punk movie, the greatest music biopic, and a shattering and unexpectedly moving love story. The critic Terrence Rafferty described it as “‘A Hard Day’s Night’ in hell.” You could also call it “Romeo and Juliet” with knives and smack.
It was Gary Oldman’s first film, and though he has never showed it much respect, I’m not kidding when I say that I think it’s still Oldman’s greatest performance — he brilliantly re-creates the sneering, self-mutilating, dumb-fuck surface of who Sid Vicious was, but he also gives him a teasing inner life that’s indelible. Chloe Webb’s performance as Nancy Spungen, the junkie girlfriend who Sid probably murdered (the role of Nancy was originally supposed to go to Courtney Love), is breathtaking in the nakedness of its emotion. Prior to “Sid and Nancy,” Alex Cox, a Britisher born in Merseyside, had made just one film, “Repo Man” (1984), that exquisite punk comedy of L.A. disaffection.
It became an instant cult classic, with lines of dialogue that loomed like koans over the ’80s (“The more you drive, the less intelligent you are,” “Ordinary fucking people. But as inspired in its absurdist nihilism as “Repo Man” was, there’s no way that anyone connected with his follow-up film, including the movie’s producer Eric Fellner, could have anticipated the raw humanity that Alex Cox would bring to “Sid and Nancy.” The thing that always got me about “Sid and Nancy” — and I saw it probably 20 times in the ’80s — is that it was a total punk party, but in its rollicking way it was a work of classicism, made with a force of empathy that was undeniable. It wasn’t just hilarious; it was dead serious.
It was true to the damaged wrecks Sid and Nancy were, yet it made them more complicated than you could have believed. The final scene, with Sid dancing with some kids around a boom box in a trash-strewn heaven, never failed to bring me to tears. Forget “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.” To me, the year that truly launched the independent-film revolution was 1986, the year of “Blue Velvet” and “Sid and Nancy.” I was dizzy with anticipation at what Alex Cox would do next.
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