Don’t see “Who Killed Nancy” to discover if Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious really did kill girlfriend and fellow junkie Nancy Spungen.
Alan G. Parker, the director of the documentary, argues against the conventional wisdom that Vicious was the killer, and suggests that the musician was too zonked out to have stabbed Nancy on the night of Oct. 12, 1978, in Room 100 of the Hotel Chelsea.
Perhaps, Parker suggests, the crime was committed by one of the other people who were in and out of the room that night, possibly in a robbery or drug deal gone bad.
But he offers no concrete evidence, only conjecture from people who knew the couple.
Less than six months after the bleached blonde and former prostitute met her end, Vicious died of a drug overdose in an apartment on Bank Street in the West Village. With Vicious — born John Simon Ritchie — gone, the NYPD closed the case.
“Who Killed Nancy” fails as a detective story, but it does offer an entertaining look at the punk scene in the 1970s.
Frequent mention of Max’s Kansas City, the legendary Warhol watering hole near Union Square where Vicious performed, brought back memories of the nights I spent there trying to look like anything but a dumb kid from Jersey while Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” blared from the jukebox.