Nico, 1988

(Susanna Nicchiarelli, Italy/Belgium, 2017)

It’s a shock, right off the bat, when familiar Danish actor Trine Dyrholm (Queen of Hearts [2019], The Girl with the Needle [2024], the TV series Brecht [2019]) walks into this movie as Nico – the Nico of the final years. Therefore: the wasted, haunted, couldn’t-give-a-fuck Nico, with those large, mad eyes captured in offhand video recordings, slurring and extemporising her way through extremely uncomfortable media interviews … all the stuff recycled today on YouTube, and deftly cut into the excellent documentary Nico Icon (1995).

But here’s Dyrholm as a robust Nico, hurling witty retorts (the film unfolds in English), sassily demanding whatever she needs, unsettling anyone she encounters with her blunt questions/observations about their cultural and racial identity. Sure, this screen-Nico wanders off to the nearest bathroom to shoot-up heroin between her toes in front of anybody who happens to be present. She doesn’t like to rehearse with her band, and she claims not to wash herself much. And occasionally she’s found, in the dead of night, banging on someone’s door in dire need of a fix.

But here she is, rocking out in a Dionysian frenzy on a makeshift stage in communist Czechoslovakia before the cops file in and close the show down! I saw Nico (with The Faction) perform at the Jump Club in Melbourne in the mid 1980s. There was no rocking out going on that night; when Nico wasn’t installed at her harmonium, she stood absolutely rigid, leaning forward slightly, with one hand forever clamped on top of the microphone on its stand (no roving, handheld singing as in this film), holding forth in her frequently nerve-jangling, atonal way. Some idiots in the crowd kept yelling for “Lou Reed!” – i.e., for the famous Velvet Underground numbers, or tracks from her 1967 Chelsea Girl album – but she frostily ignored these dopey entreaties and simply launched into the next intractable item on her setlist.

That harmonium. It was a big part of her act, her image – and her life, it seems. Remember that this instrument is fully acoustic – no outputs for amplification – and is powered by the player continuously pumping air into pipes via creaky foot pedals. (I played one for humble Catholic Sunday Masses over many years, so I know!) Nico physically schlepped her beloved harmonium around the world with her, and sometimes had to move heaven and earth to get it out of hock. It was hell (as I gathered during her Melbourne gig) to mic up and mix in the context of a minimalistic but nonetheless noisy rock band.

Nico composed and played on this instrument in a singular, self-taught manner: one bass note, frequently held for a long time and two alternating treble notes in a trill motion on top of that. That is the true Nico sound, which John Cale enhanced into a grand, cavernous ambience, adorning it with sparse instrumentation on the now-classic albums he produced and musically arranged for her (The Marble Index [1968], Desertshore [1970] and The End … [1974]). This is also the sound that accompanied the 1970s experimental films of her partner in that period, Philippe Garrel, in which she appeared. (When asked by one clueless Australian interviewer about her 1985 album title Camera Obscura, another Cale production, she replied with a dark laugh that, since there were no more “French avant-garde films” in her life at that point, the camera was now obscura!)

The harmonium is present, but not featured, in Nico, 1988. I take this as a symptom of why – even as a necessarily stylised, condensed, reconstituted-as-usual music biopic – it doesn’t work very well.

The film is set, more or less, in the post-Manchester phase of Nico’s nomadic life, straight after the period poignantly documented by participant witness James Young in his remarkable 1992 book, Songs They Never Play on the Radio. Like in the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown (2024) and numerous films of this ilk, Italian writer-director Susanna Nicchiarelli slices and dices the facts and elements of its subject’s life from this time into a manageable narrative: the backing band in the film is, more or less, a non-band drawing on some real-life figures while inventing others; and her unrequitedly pining but droll manager, Jewish-British Richard (John Gordon Sinclair), is a fictive stand-in, it would seem, for the actual Alan Wise (died 2016 at age 63).

This character of Richard is, in fact, one of the more successful threads in the film, although his on-off relationship with fellow tour manager, Sylvia (Anamaria Marinca), over-eggs the pathos-pudding somewhat. Another element that works well is the casting of Sandor Funtek as Nico’s son Ari (who died in 2023 of a heroin overdose) – at least, he does look like he could be Alain Delon’s progeny!

A fleeting aspect of the film that I admire is its resistance of the temptation to flashback: beyond the dreamlike introductory and insert shots of her as a child in wartime Berlin ruins, the only glimpses of Nico’s storied past come in jittery, split-second frames from Jonas Mekas’ visual diaries of the Warhol Factory years. (Scorsese drew on the same avant-garde archive, with less happy results, for his Dylan doco, No Direction Home [2005].) Curiously, the subsequent career of Nicchiarelli (Nico, 1988 was already her third feature since 2009) has resolutely stuck to the ‘misfit with inner demons’ biopic strain: Miss Marx (2020) is about Karl’s ultimately suicidal daughter Eleanor, while Chiara (2022) delves into Saint Clare of Assisi!

Ultimately, and paradoxically, I am probably too much of a Nico fan – and too immersed in the existing biographical documentation across various media – to be the ideal viewer for Nico, 1988. I know too much about her to accept the dramatic and musical paraphrase that the film offers. It would doubtless work better for novices still at the gateway of a Nico obsession (or: total indifference to her legacy). And, for me at least, the end-credits cap-off, while pleasant to hear – Dyrholm giving a not-quite-Nico-ish rendition of Alphaville’s “Big In Japan” – wraps the parcel up with a too-smug, jokey-ironic note.

Give me the sudden and (literally) cryptic sight of Garrel’s alter ego silently trembling before a corner of Nico’s Berlin tomb in the cine-memoir J’entends plus la guitare (1991) any damn day.

© Adrian Martin 14 March 2025