Critical reception From the 70 reviews collected by review aggregator
Rotten Tomatoes, the film received an overall approval rating of 89%, with the consensus: "Visceral, energetic, and often very sad,
Sid & Nancy is also a surprisingly touching love story, and Gary Oldman is outstanding as the late punk rock icon Sid Vicious."
Roger Ebert gave
Sid and Nancy four-out-of-four in his review for
The Chicago Sun-Times, writing that Cox and his crew "pull off the neat trick of creating a movie full of noise and fury, and telling a meticulous story right in the middle of it." Appearing on
The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers, Ebert said, to agreement from
Rivers and applause from the audience, that Oldman "definitely won't be
[Oscar] nominated – and should be", this being for the reason that "Hollywood will not nominate an actor for portraying a creep, no matter how good the performance is". In a subsequent article on Oldman, Ebert referred to the movie's titular couple as "punk rock's
Romeo and Juliet."
Richard Hell called the film 'depressing' and noted 'I'm glad to have outgrown those days'. In his book ''Sid Vicious: Rock N' Roll Star'', Malcolm Butt describes Webb's performance as Spungen as "intense, powerful, and most important of all, believable." Oldman's portrayal of Vicious was ranked #62 in
Premiere magazine's "100 Greatest Performances of All Time".
Uncut magazine ranked Gary Oldman as #8 in its "10 Best actors in rockin' roles" list, describing his portrayal as a "hugely sympathetic reading of the punk figurehead as a lost and bewildered manchild." In 2003,
Rolling Stone ranked
Sid and Nancy as the third-best rock movie ever made, and in 2014,
ShortList named it the ninth-greatest music
biopic of all time. Not all reviews of the film were positive.
Leslie Halliwell reiterated a line from a review that appeared in
Sight & Sound: "Relentlessly whingeing performances and a lengthy slide into drugs, degradation and death make this a solemnly off-putting moral tract."
Andrew Schofield was ranked #1 in
Uncut magazine's "10 Worst actors in rockin' roles", which described his performance as
Sex Pistols lead singer Johnny Rotten (real name
John Lydon) as a "short-arse
Scouse Bleasdale regular never once looking like he means it". Commentary on the Criterion
DVD dismisses the film's portrayal of Lydon as wholly inaccurate.
Paul Simonon of
The Clash also criticised the movie for portraying Lydon as "some sort of fat, bean-slurping idiot." Although not a box office success (generating $2,826,523 in the U.S. on a $4 million budget),
Sid and Nancy has become a cult hit;
Yahoo! Movies described the film as a "poignant and uncompromising
cult classic".
John Lydon's reaction Lydon commented on the film in his 1994
autobiography,
Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs: In a later interview, Lydon was asked the question, "Did the movie get anything right?" to which he replied: "Maybe the name Sid." Cox's attitude toward his subjects was negative; one of the reasons he was attracted to the project was that he was afraid that if someone else made it, it would portray its subjects as "real exemplars of Punk, rather than sold-out traitors to it." He acknowledged that Lydon's hatred of the movie was "understandable, given that it was based on incidents from his life and centred around one of his friends." Lydon claimed that drummer
Paul Cook was more upset over the movie than he was, though the latter has not spoken publicly about it. In a 1987 interview on
The Late Show when asked by interviewer
Elayne Boosler about his thoughts on the movie, guitarist
Steve Jones said: "For someone who didn't know anything about the Sex Pistols I guess it was a good way of describing it, but it's really hard for me to be judgemental of it because I was actually there at the time. I mean I didn’t like the guy who played me. […] The only thing I liked about it was the way they portrayed where and how drugs take you. That was the best thing I thought about the movie”. On his radio show, Jonesy's Jukebox in 2006, Jones said he "hated" the movie. Ironically, he would later end up interviewing Gary Oldman on his show. In Cox's own, 2008, autobiography he refuted Lydon's claim about not meeting before the film, stating that they enjoyed a 90-minute, alcohol-fuelled, discussion about the script, who should play 'Johnny Rotten', and other aspects of production. Cox stated that Andrew Schofield (who played Lydon in the film) also met with Lydon; and when Lydon noticed Schofield was a
Liverpudlian, rather than a Londoner like himself, he encouraged Schofield to play the part as a
Scouser, which Cox took as a sign that they agreed it would be better to portray a more fictionalised version of the characters, rather than a strictly accurate re-telling of facts. Cox said he then offered the role to Schofield the following day. He suggested that Lydon's alcohol consumption at the meeting could explain why Lydon did not recall the event. ==Legacy==