This is a first … I have never seen a biopic –or musical for that matter – in which the subject had less talent than I have. I cannot speak to the real Christa Päffgen (a.k.a Nico, lead singer of Velvet Underground in the 1960s), but Trine Dyrholm, the actress who played her, had no shortage of issues regarding pitch, tone, key, etc. … there’s a scene in act II in which her band has discovered the worst beach resort in all of Europe. Asked to solo in what appears to be a coffee shop lobby, the actress shoots heroin and wanders on “stage.” I thought she was going to pass out. I wish she had. I want to use the word “butcher” here, but butchers are artists compared to what Ms. Dyrholm did to “Nature Boy.” Let me put it this way – when you hire an actress to play a singer, the actress should be able to sing.
Well, at least Nico was a really pleasant person to follow, huh? Not a condescending, mean, drug-addled, hypocritical diva, right? I should have known trouble was coming when the movie began with a new manager and a new band for the fortysomething-going-on-seventysomething former star. If you are a has-been and nobody from the successful part of your life wants anything to do with you … well, seriously, don’t be Chevy Chase. That’s just sad.
In 1986, “Nico” (she preferred “Christa”) went on a hostility tour in -I’m guessing- an attempt to find the ugliest places in Europe and make them even worse: only stopping long enough to deliver snotty interviews, she piled into a station wagon with seven of her new best friends and visited the dregs of Eastern Europe. This band played venues that made the least of This Is Spinal Tap look like Madison Square Garden. How exactly do you collect receipts from a few dozen stragglers in a forgotten alley? Maybe that unadvertised warehouse in Soviet Bloc Czechoslovakia paid off, huh? She clearly doesn’t care about the fans, the venues, the crowd, the scene. To be fair, Christa lives in Manchester because it reminds her of childhood in crippled Germany at the end of WWII. That’s messed up. Still, what’s the point of doing something you don’t enjoy for no money?
Oh, I get it; she’s on tour for the drugs. Sticking herself in the ankle before every concert, Nico handled all sorts of half-assed crowds by wandering on stage and having
an atonal argument with her microphone. Oh, I love the part where she chews out her dazed guitarist for taking drugs before the show. She even storms out and “ruins” the gig for good measure. Wow, lady, you are equally as endearing as a bigot at a Trump rally.
I get what Nico, 1988 was trying to do. This woman was a minor celebrity once who never grew out of divadom enough to look beyond her needles. Her life was rougher than it needed to be because she lived too-fast-too-young. Critics might find this a complex and layered journey. Thing is, movie, you showed me only the back end, where this awful woman whined and bossed and shot up, then whined and bossed and shot up more. And then she sang like a walrus in heat. The only way Nico, 1988 works if it’s a sequel made decades after an original biopic marking the 1960s rollercoaster of stardom. Only then can we the audience truly appreciate, “Good God, woman. What happened to you?!” And even then, it would be tough to reconcile secondary feelings of, “I really don’t like this person. At all.”
♪There was a girl
A mirthless, swollen, has-been girl
I see she wandered very far
In a car on a touring spree
Not at all shy, she lived a lie
With many she’d disagree
And then one day
One awful day M-Pass went gray
I couldn’t watch the film I chose
Goodness knows
This lady bitched at me
The only thing
I ever learned
Was do some drugs
And do more
Sans concern♫
Rated R, 93 Minutes
Director: Susanna Nicchiarelli
Writer: Susanna Nicchiarelli
Genre: The lives of those who shit the king-sized gilded bed
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Critics, I guess
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Music lovers
♪ Parody Inspired by “Nature Boy”
