Margin Rockers: Nico, 1988 (2017 dir. Susanna Nicchiarelli, Italy)
by Matt Olsen
Almost anyone who knows me (which is an increasingly & distressingly small number) can attest that my interests are primarily centered around two things, movies and music. And yet, I have never enjoyed any of the seemingly endless parade of music ‘biopics’. The very word fills me with a contempt I can’t articulate. Whenever I accidentally watch one, there’s a bullet point / greatest hits quality to the storytelling: Here’s how the band met. Here’s how that song was written. Here’s the part where they almost break up and then decide to stay together. Here’s the comeback. Here’s how the main guy died. And so on. And on. Add to that performances that, to me, typically feel more like off-season SNL impressions than real characters and, well, a lot of people enjoy them so I won’t belabor the argument against. Instead, I’d like to highlight a few movies (not all based on real biographies) that I think portray left of center rock music and musicians in a realistic and compelling way beyond the jukebox.
(I’m well aware that the subject of this week’s column isn’t nearly as well-known as Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Elton John, Freddie Mercury, et al, so for anyone who wants it, Nico was a German-born model turned singer most commonly associated with the early days of Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground though she later released several highly-regarded albums of her own and still reigns today as one of the originators of Goth rock.)
Nico, 1988 takes a different approach to the traditional rock bio. Aside from one brief, non-narrative flashback sequence made up of actual archival footage from the late 1960s, this film only shows the icon well after the peak of her fame. Limited to the last few years of her life, she’s a middle-aged functioning addict touring Eastern Bloc countries with an assembled band of randos. She’s also working with a new manager, recording the ambient sounds of a broken water heater, reconnecting with her hospitalized son, and shooting up in the bathroom while looking at real estate. The glamorous life it’s not but the salacious bits are given the same weight as the mundane creating a more nuanced, lifelike portrait. Unlike the rock bio films disparaged above, not every scene here has to be one of the defining moments of this person’s life. Or even historically accurate. There is ample room in this film for Nico to exist as a character separate from the face screen-printed on a t-shirt.
In another contrast, outside of a shaggy brown wig, there’s very little effort to make the lead actress, Trine Dyrholm, match the likeness of the real person. Nico’s famously razor-sharp cheekbones and jawline are entirely opposite from the rounded, soft features of Dyrholm and, here’s the kicker, after the first few minutes it really doesn’t matter. The Nico character as played without reservations by Dyrholm is an utterly complete volcano. Whether she bears any resemblance (either physically or in her personality) is of no significance when she feels this total and authentic – which should always be the primary goal, anyway.
In the live performance segments, Dyrholm attacks the songs with an intensity I’ve never associated with the real Nico but, again, who cares about mimeographed accuracy when the music is volatile, pure, and exciting? This Nico is the absolute best Nico for this movie. The songs have been reconstructed / redesigned for the film with Dyrholm performing the vocals in another instance of avoiding slavish reverence for the sake of the movie. One sequence, based on actual events, shows the band playing an illegal concert in Soviet-era Prague and is amongst the most thrilling “live” rock movie performances you’ll see.
With biographical or historical films, there is always a danger of the viewer going in with the knowledge of how the story ends. As some friend or other once put it in regard to the Joy Division film, Control: “It doesn’t matter how good it is. You’re still waiting two hours for a guy to hang himself.” Since Nico, 1988 is titled in reference to the year of her death that’s never far from the audience’s mind. It’s never going to be a twist ending. Because the portrait of this musician plays more than just the hits, when the moment comes – and it’s not presented in a grotesque, exploitative way – Nico’s end feels like the end of a person, not the beginning of a legend.
Matt Olsen is a largely unemployed part-time writer and even more part-time commercial actor living once again in Seattle after escaping from Los Angeles like Kurt Russell in that movie about the guy who escapes from Los Angeles.