“I’ve been at the top. I’ve been at the bottom,” says the title character in Susanna Nicchiarelli’s biopic, Nico, 1988. “Both places are empty.”
The sentiment perfectly sums up the late German singer’s nihilistic, affectless power. Coupled with her beauty—boldly drawn features and the two-dimensional planes of her face—it gave her, at least in my adoring teenage mind, the right to be called a latter-day icon before that became a thing. Her barely tuneful songs and limited musical range only added to her imperious allure. Yet the same merciless qualities that had fans worship at her dark altar made her hard to like. (Anthony DeCurtis’s 2017 biography, Lou Reed: A Life, describes Nico telling his subject, “I cannot make love to Jews anymore.”)
Amazingly, this movie, which stars the brilliant Danish actress Trine Dyrholm, manages to cut through Nico’s carefully crafted mask. Biopics, and perhaps in particular, those that focus on musicians, tend to be unsatisfying: A striving actor meticulously impersonates Jim Morrison, say, or Sid Vicious, in a life story that’s not really a story and whose contours are boringly familiar. Nicchiarelli, a young Italian director (Discovery at Dawn, Cosmonauta), avoids those pitfalls by focusing on a narrow, lesser known slice of Nico’s life: the two years leading up to her death in Ibiza in a bicycle accident at age 49. The director’s sources included witnesses to her life at this time, and in particular her troubled and beloved son, Ari.
This Nico, who has reverted to her real name, Christa Päffgen, has lost her looks; she’s aggressive and overweight and daily injects heroin into her ankles. “I wasn’t happy when I was beautiful,” she notes. And yet she can still make a man fall in love with her. As she moves to Manchester and is persuaded by her manager to tour Europe and Czechoslovakia, several suitors vie for her affection, not least the manager himself, played by John Gordon Sinclair. (Does anyone besides me remember the teenage love story Gregory’s Girl, or as they say in Scotland, “Graygory’s Gerrul”?)
The scenes of the low-budget tour with a mostly drug-addicted band are masterpieces of boredom, tension, and shifting dynamics. Nico resents the public interest in her past, not her present, and bristles at being introduced as Lou Reed’s femme fatale. “I only sang three songs with them; the rest of the time I was playing the tambourine in the background,” she crossly tells a pair of interviewers intrigued by her Velvet Underground years. She misbehaves; gives performances that are wantonly bad. But she also reveals her Achilles’ heel, Ari (her son by Alain Delon), who was taken away from her as a child and is now a suicidal adult in her care.
And against the odds, things start moving forward. She plays an extraordinary concert in Prague and her musical vision is rekindled. She gets off heroin and on to methadone. She talks joyfully about how, having experienced hunger as a child in wartime Berlin and having had to starve herself thin as a model, she now loves to eat. She reveals in an interview why she always carries around a portable recording machine. “I’m looking for a sound I heard when I was a kid,” she says. “It was the wind carrying it. It was the sound of Berlin being bombed, of the war ending, of the city burning. It was a sound that wasn’t really a sound; it was many things at the same time. It was the sound of defeat.”
She even plays around with the words of Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” (“We will grieve not, rather find/Strength in what remains behind”) as she contemplates her past and her future. And then, the darkness falls.
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