NICO, 1988 - SPECIAL INTEREST [DVD] [2017]

I love Nico's music. And like a lot of true innovators, she was not particularly understood or appreciated while she was alive. This film vividly recreates the chaos of her final years - heroin addicted for most of them, and touring to largely apathetic audiences (with the wonderful exception of an illegal concert in Prague). It's an intelligent film, skillfully directed. Covering big issues without labouring any of them. We see the traumatic impact of the war on this deeply troubled artist. The pain of being a mother unable, emotionally, to manage the demands of motherhood. The objectification she continually suffered as an intelligent but very beautiful woman. And the contempt she drew to herself by deliberately trying (though never entirely succeeding) to destroy that beauty. Trine Dyrholm is wonderful as Nico. Capturing the humanity that drew and held people to her even when she was at her most difficult. John Gordon Sinclair is beautifully understated as Rick, the manager, who loved her with a love that was completely unrequited. And of course, the music's great too!

A fascinating glimpse into the life of Rock Icon Nico, glimpse because it charts the final year of her life. Trine Dyrholm is always amazing to watch and carrys out the suspension of belief impeccably.. she even sang the songs! The choice of 4:3 works for me as it makes it more intimate. This is a film for anyone, whether you are aware of Nico or not..

Good film but if you rent this and look at the trivia section Amazon have put info from the STEVEN SEGAL film NICO. Simple mistake to make, (if you are morons).

a great film covering the last 2 years of her lifewith a great actress playing the part of Nicorevealing the human side of the breathtaking alien that the Velvet Underground adopted as they're very own in the 1960ssure she had flaws … not least an awful heroin habitwilful , stubborn , determined .... yet hardly anyone hated herthis film shows why most people who knew her were rather fond of hereven those with whom she constantly squabbled still had a soft spot for the Velvet's Ice Maidenif you're a huge Nico fan , it doesn't really matter its all in Italianthe songs are in Englishand Nico's gothic melancholic anthems transcend language

Writer/Director Susanna Nicchiarelli's flint-edged, wickedly acerbic biographical drama takes the viewer on a refreshingly raw and unsentimental tour of the final fitful years of the incomparable artist formerly known as Nico aka Christa Päffgen. Starting in a deceptively prosaic manner with earnest, starstruck manager Richard (John Gordon Sinclair) showing the prospective tenant Christa (Trine Dyrholm) around a rundown property in Manchester, feigning the need to pee, Christa injects heroin, and, thus, we are unflinchingly drawn into the tragic, blackly funny, spirited, paranoid, sporadically beautiful final years of this incomparable artiste! Music biogs are all too often trite, overly burnished homilies, but 'Nico' 1988' excitingly captures the beguiling enigma of its inimitable musical heroine. Trine Dyrholm's Christa is a fearless force of nature, whether onstage mesmerically invoking Nico's music with an exhilarating verisimilitude, immobilized by heroin, or kvetching acidly with equally strung-out band members, Trine Dyrholm's dynamite performance is vividly charged with a deliciously dark magnetism! Such a palpably doomy, downward-spiralling film centred upon the more diminished capacities of such a unique artist could be depressingly maudlin, yet 'Nico, 1988', while undeniably heartbreaking, is also vivid, uproarious, elegiac, celebratory, and it rocks exceedingly hard indeed! This is exemplary film-making, the decadent, insalubrious 80s are immaculately realised, a deliciously unglamorous milieu of rickety, claustrophobically snug transit vans, anonymous, ill-lit venues, cramped, makeshift accommodations, dismal, drug-laced inertia all leavened by brief cathartic ecstasy of the stage are all thrillingly rendered in Susanna Nicchiarelli's adrenalized musical masterpiece! Along with Trine Dyrholm's formidable presence, I was also taken by the beguilingly gentle performance by Anamaria Marinca as the kindly, ingenuous Romania Violinist Sylvia. Wholly deserving its accolades 'Nico, 1988' is a searing, soul stirring, sonically satisfying biopic of a fascinatingly elusive, fathoms deep, wholly irreplaceable musical iconoclast.

Strong central performance can't save this sincere and uncliched film about an addicted artist from feeling drably drawn out.

Not the film that was advertised

It shows as the Steven Seagal film about Nico the cop. I clicked on it and PAID for it. It plays as the film about Nico who was in Velvet Underground . Sort it out Amazon. I paid £5.99 for this !!!!