Sid & Nancy, Alex Cox's 1986 biopic of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, remains a divisive film decades on, having provoked criticism from punk figures and Vicious's own mother for its portrayal of the couple's doomed relationship. The film dramatised the pair's descent into heroin addiction and violence, culminating in Spungen's death at New York's Hotel Chelsea in October 1978 and Vicious's own fatal overdose months later, and it has long been accused of romanticising a relationship that was, in reality, marked by abuse and self-destruction.

Spungen, a Philadelphia-born groupie dubbed "Nauseating Nancy" by the British press, arrived in London in December 1976 with the band The Heartbreakers before attaching herself to Vicious after being turned down by Johnny Rotten. The couple's relationship was volatile and fuelled by shared heroin addiction, and after the Sex Pistols split during their disastrous 1978 US tour, the pair moved to New York's Hotel Chelsea, where Spungen was later found stabbed to death in their room. The article revisits how the film's makers approached this bleak true story, including criticism that they softened Vicious's own squalid death rather than depicting it more starkly.