Watched Sid & Nancy last night for the first time in a long while. It’s a great biographical drama about Sid Vicious, bass player for The Sex Pistols and his girlfriend and their spiral into oblivion due primarily to drug abuse.

There is a lot I like about the movie. A very young Gary Oldman plays the stand out role of Sid. He really does make the movie and is virtually unrecognizable from his characters today like Commissioner Gordon in the Batman franchise.

I was surprised to learn that Courtney Love has a role in the movie…she plays the small part of Gretchen. I was surprised because the movie was made in 1986 when Love was an unknown, three years before she formed the band Hole and years longer till she would meet Kurt Cobain and live a very similar life.

Sid and his friend Johnny Rotten have a significant problem they are trying to work through in the early part of the film – boredom. Everything is boring to them. Johnny throws himself into the music and anarchy to alleviate his boredom while Sid throws himself into drugs and Nancy.

While The Sex Pistols were about Rotten’s musical message of anarchy Vicious became about drugs…as long as the two were on different tangents it was inevitable that they would breakup…each pursuing their own solution to boredom.

Boredom. Interesting concept. I can relate to this. You can have a myriad of different things going on in your life but somehow still find yourself bored. It is a deep sense of dissatisfaction and emptiness.  It can work itself out in very destructive ways or it can simply sit within and corrode you.

People become bored not because they have nothing to do but because they are not content. They have been given no real sense of purpose.

The movie gets all this across and more. It is worth watching.