Nico, 1988 (2017)

Nico, 1988 suffers from the usual limitations of biopics—a certain inevitable self-satisfaction, and if you know anything about the subject you already know where it's all headed. But credit where due: director and screenwriter Susanna Nicchiarelli has stitched together a lot of effective elements, focusing on the end of the line for Nico (born Christa Paffgen), who died in 1988. Trine Dyrholm delivers a convincing and affecting Nico, there's some nice support from John Gordon Sinclair (Gregory in Gregory's Girl) and Karina Fernandez (Happy-Go-Lucky, Another Year), and the band—an Italian post-rock outfit called Gatto Ciliegia contro il Grande Freddo—is much better than the treatment Nico is shown giving them. Indeed, it is perhaps better than the actual thing, in the way biopics exaggerate and heighten for effect. I seem to know a lot of people who saw Nico on her endless tour in the '80s and the reports are never good, telling tales of a disgruntled middle-aged heroin addict making music with strange uneven powers who couldn't accept that her moment came and went when she played a tambourine and sang with the Velvet Underground (there's a great moment here when someone seems to have her confused with Marianne Faithfull or Anita Pallenberg).  My turn was at Duffy's in Minneapolis in something like 1982. She was pumping at a harmonium on her own while people catcalled for songs they had to know she couldn't do, like "Heroin." That show did not last long, cut off when she left the stage abruptly, angry about something. I think we got five songs. In this movie, the shows are short too. But the high point of the picture is one of them, a mysterious show in Prague in 1986. It's cut short by the appearance of Soviet Czechoslovakian police to hassle the promoter. Nico and at least one other member of the band are suffering withdrawal symptoms because they could not bring heroin across the border and haven't been able to find any there. Nico takes to the stage shaky and coated in a thin film of sweat. They play one song, "My Heart Is Empty," before they have to flee the hall altogether. It is an amazing, roaring performance—I wish I could look at it over and over again tonight. (It has not yet made it to YouTube, but there's a snippet.) Otherwise, Nico, 1988 explores Nico's experience in Berlin as a girl at the end of World War II for general purposes of psychological motivation, and does a bit of dancing around with her white supremacist ways, though not enough. There's also some stuff about her son and her death in 1988, at 49. I wish there had been more of that band.