On 12 October 1978, the body of Nancy Spungen was found in the bathroom of a hotel room that had Sid Vicious, unconscious, on its bed. An extremely large amount of quite frightening drugs had been consumed and a lot of evidence pointed to him having killed her. Who Killed Nancy? scrutinises that evidence and interviews several people who knew both of them, to try to get to the bottom of it…

..Though I have no idea why. It’d be nice to know what happened, I’m sure, and the film makes it pretty interesting. But I wonder whether that’s the best thing that can be done with this story. Punk culture is in the process of being absorbed into other cultures, and so we’re increasingly interested in these episodes in its tempestuous history. So I think it’d be more interesting to explore how people think of Sid and the story, rather than just try to find out what happened. The majority of the evidence we’re given comes from talking heads, and while they’re generally quite informative, their extremely shocking attitudes are much more interesting than their moderately shocking memories. You get the idea that in the world of Vicious and Spungen - live fast and die young - murder just becomes another insane thing that happened the other night. This attitude could seem disrespectful, but the contributors are just trying to be truthful and informative. But isn’t there a bit more potential than that?

I wonder how much there was to the lives Sid and Nancy ended up leading. Perhaps that means that I’m missing something. Perhaps in punk culture there’s an assumed depth to Nancy Spungen, and on balance the film is just working with that, but it could have been better done. The film has a series of animations running through it which just try to give an atmosphere of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. Objectively, it’s this: doing vast amounts of drugs, sleeping with whoever or whatever you liked, and having respect and admiration lauded upon you constantly. I can see the appeal, and I can also see how living like that for a large amount of time could turn things into a kind of lucid dream. But does it make you compelling? Does it give your music the kind of power and intricacy that something so popular should have? About that question, I’d like to see a documentary. You’d need a hell of an interviewer to illict the kind of truths and reactions that could convince anyone either way, but you could do it.

Who Killed Nancy? flirts with this kind of interest. An archived interview with Sid shows him with an intriguing level of depression, and one interviewee describes how Sid once hung a cat in front of him. You hear about rock stars doing stuff like that all the time, though - it’s basically a pose. But that’s all the depth you get. That could almost be OK: the persona of Sid Vicious does have an impressive screen presence, even when it isn’t on it, in a shallow kind of way. It’s a legend bourne partially on a few interviews of him, partially on his music, but mostly on the stories of everyone who ever knew anyone who knew him, which the rock community is full of. So how much of it is a pose? If people have personalities that can be discussed three decades after their deaths, and write music that can stir people in the way theirs did, can the whole thing really have been an act? This is never answered. If you were to go into the theatre with the opinion that Vicious was a junkie with nothing to him, you would come out the same way. If you went in believing him to be a tortured and intricate man, you would probably come out the same way too. The film doesn’t advance his personality at all.

Nancy’s personality is explored almost as best it can be. In the middle the film uncertainly puts its title aside and lapses into something like a comedic biography. Nancy was apparently an extremely licentious social climber, who had been snorting with the upper crust of the rock world since she was thirteen. Personally I don’t take too much from this because it’s easy to characterise and honestly it seems as though no-one (in this film, at least) knew Nancy very well. Then there’s this particularly poisonous account of the amount that she used to harm herself. It’s there to cautiously suggest that she may have commited suicide, and in retrospect it’s amazing how it gets away without commenting on absolutely anything else. It’s portrayed as a shallow action, but then it always is. It’s hard to talk about self harm in anything but the same kind of lazy generalisations. It’s always put down to either attention starvation or spite or just general anxiety, all of which are meant to amount to an action with no real motive in sight. For Nancy it seems it was all those things plus drugs, but there’s a thick line separating anything like that from suicide. They don’t really explore whether Nancy could have crossed that line. The whole section is just there to bitch, and to suggest a possible answer to the titular question.

Some psychology is alluded to, again, with the psychoanalysis it almost uses to suggest another suspect. One big feature of Sid’s life which the film explores is his mother, Anne Ritchie, who was quite an important character in the story and a friend of the producer. To me she represents how society treated Sid: always being extremely nice to him while at the same time putting him through a lot, which is made up for with heroin. It seems that she was often around, although whether Sid wanted her there much isn’t known. And God knows what the details of the relationships were, but for no apparent reason, Nancy hated Anne. These are the facts though, and that’s what you get. It’s never suggested with any directness at all that Anne killed Nancy, or that Sid killed Nancy because of Anne. I’m not actually sure what lead to a portrayal like this. Perhaps they investigated her personality as much as they could for the sake of these motives but it never turned up anything because she was too nice and Sid was too complacent. Perhaps they were trying to get a better insight into his life. Perhaps it was a tribute by the producer. Either way it’s quite interesting, but not really revelatory.

Let me take a step back from psychology and talk about the thing that the film wants me to. Sid Vicious probably did kill Nancy Spungen, but the doubt is very reasonable. A lot of drug dealers and junkies knew how to get to the hotel room and knew that Sid and Nancy had drugs and money, some of which was apparently stolen. That would have been enough for most reasonable juries (especially considering Sid’s renowned lawyer), but there’s one suspect at whom they arbitrarily direct a lot of focus anyway. He had the means, but apart from that the only suspicious thing about him is comes from one of the interviewees. While talking about something else, he once whispered ‘I did it’ – the interviewee claims they ‘just knew’ what he was talking about. This is really quite awkward compared with the authoritativeness of the rest of the film when for all we know he could have been talking about the shopping. The fact is that Anne Ritchie isn’t the only loose thread that probably originally looked to be pretty secure.  Sid’s next girlfriend, Michele Robinson, is talked about a little. Again it’s worked into the story. And again it just ends up being incidental, and at this point you can begin to wonder where a rigourous exploration becomes a desperate bid for complexity.

Who killed Nancy? is never that desperate, though. The film knows just what direction it wants to go in, and that’s the reason it didn’t go too far in any other. The forensic details are for some reason narrated by the kind of unholy voice that you usually hear in trailers, but they are very comprehensive. They’re also edited together with the interviews in a way that genuinely has your verdict swinging around all over the place, just as it should do. There’s always a certain dubiousness with the interviews. You know that the already hazy stories make their tellers rich and legendary, and that’s one of the reasons I think this investigative documentary allows itself to get too bogged down by the ‘evidence’. But no documentary has escaped a little bit of dubiousness, and it couldn’t be more objective (the speakers give their verdicts at the beginning – quite entertainingly, it’s precisely half and half). If you want to know who killed Nancy then this is the film for you. If you want a humourous and interesting exploration of the eclectic lives of rock musicians then you could do worse, but they could do a lot better.