About the only thing definitively established by the generically titled biopic Nico, 1988 is that its subject, the singer best known for her stint with the Velvet Underground, didn’t want to be remembered that way. Thanks to writer-director Susanna Nicchiarelli, you can almost hear the ghost of Nico, who died in 1988, railing against writers who reduce her to that (albeit prominent) blip in her career. It’s too bad that the film, which focuses on Nico’s final years, suffers from a mostly unconvincing impersonation and a drama that’s only intermittently effective. It’s a low batting average for the portrayal of an eventful if ultimately shaggy life.
The movie begins with a pair of shots that seem to mirror its own failures and successes. We first see young Nico watching a distant conflagration which her mother explains is the burning of Berlin; we then see an adult Nico (Tryne Dyrholm) telling her son Ari (Sandro Funtek) that she’s going out for a bike ride. If you know her story, you know that’s the last ride she’d take; she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and fell off her bike. Nico, 1988 opens with a heavy-handed image but recovers with a bittersweet moment that suggests the singer found peace near the end of her tumultuous life.
That peace is elusive for the rest of the movie, and so is Nico. Dyrholm, a reliable actress who was terrific as a middle-aged career woman in The Commune (2016), has a potentially meaty role as a faded beauty struggling to overcome her former notoriety and icy doll-like image and trying to assert her own aesthetic voice. But as the actress begins to flex her Nico-ness, first in candid interviews and then as she performs the singer’s late-career material, begins to feel like a dark karaoke act, and you can almost see the wheels turning in Dyrholm’s face as she approximates her character’s signature Teutonic huskiness.
It’s hard to shake the sense of mere impersonation in biopics, and stronger writing and directing could have helped Dyrholm navigate the waters of a troubled and, by all accounts, cranky figure. Nicchiarelli’s script doesn’t attempt to show Nico in the best light–we see her shooting up drugs into her leg and berating members of her band on stage—but it oddly skirts over charges of anti-Semitism. But this complicated figure rarely comes to life.
For the most part, Nico, 1988 covers what would be Nico’s final concert tours, plodding along like a seedy tour diary, without sensationalism but also without much enthusiasm. Still, this loose structure leads to the movie’s most convincing musical (and dramatic) performance. For a concert in Prague, Dyrholm pulls off a chilling rendition of “My Heart is Empty,” from Nico’s final album, Camera Obscura, with a heightened intensity brought on by the spectacle of government officials sweeping in to arrest the concert promoter.
Unfortunately, other, more traumatic events fall flat, and most of the music footage makes you want to seek out the real thing. The 1995 documentary Nico/Icon provided a more thorough look at the singer’s life and career, and proved that she should be the stuff of a biopic filmmaker’s dream. Nico, 1988 leaves that dream unfulfilled.
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