The film portrays the life of Sid Vicious, bassist of the punk rock band the Sex Pistols, and his destructive relationship with girlfriend Nancy Spungen.

A little more than a year earlier, in 1977, close friends and band members Sid and Johnny Rotten meet Nancy, a heroin-addicted American groupie who had come to London to bed the Sex Pistols.

Sid dismisses her at first, as her intentions are obvious, but begins dating her after feeling sympathy for the rejection she faces from fellow punk performers.

Nancy brings Sid to Philadelphia to meet her family, who are horrified by the couple's reckless behavior and physical state.

Sid and Nancy return to New York and settle in the Hotel Chelsea, where they live in squalor and depend on opiates supplied by their drug dealer, Bowery Snax.

Their love affair ends tragically one night when, during an argument in which Sid announces his plans to stop using heroin and return to England to restart his life, a suicidal Nancy begs him to kill her.

The idea for the film began with a 1980 screenplay entitled Too Kool to Die; a fictional story inspired by Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious, featuring references to current English politics which Cox realised would make it unlikely to be financed.

Four years later, after his directorial debut with Repo Man, Cox heard rumour of the possibility of a Hollywood film documenting the relationship of Spungen and Vicious, with Madonna and Rupert Everett in the lead roles - "For anyone who had been vaguely into the Punk movement, this was a troubling idea indeed", Cox wrote in his 2008 autobiography, and it motivated him to re-work his earlier script.

[3] “I felt an obligation to struggle against that project, fearing it would be even worse than mine.”[4] Cox's film, originally titled Love Kills, is based on the mutually destructive, drug and sex filled relationship between Sid and Nancy.

Work on the film was almost complete when the financers received a letter from a party claiming to own the title Love Kills and threatening legal action.

[6] - "My agent at the time put a lot of pressure and bullied me into it", according to an Oldman interview, included in an early DVD version of the film.

Therefore, instead, Cox wrote the minor role of Gretchen, one of Sid and Nancy's New York junkie friends, specifically for her benefit.

Cox told the NME: "We wanted to make the film not just about Sid Vicious and punk rock, but as an anti-drugs statement, the turbulent couple definitely falls into the depths of drug addiction.

[12] Prominent musicians made appearances in the film including Circle Jerks, Love, Iggy Pop, Nico and Edward Tudor-Pole of Tenpole Tudor.

The film was primarily shot in London and New York City, though additional photography (particularly the sequences of the Sex Pistols' North American tour) was completed in Los Angeles and El Centro, California.

"[14] Roger Ebert gave Sid and Nancy four-out-of-four in his review for The Chicago Sun-Times, writing that Cox and his crew "pull off the neat trick of creating a movie full of noise and fury, and telling a meticulous story right in the middle of it.

[16] In a subsequent article on Oldman, Ebert referred to the movie's titular couple as "punk rock's Romeo and Juliet.

[18] In his book Sid Vicious: Rock N' Roll Star, Malcolm Butt describes Webb's performance as Spungen as "intense, powerful, and most important of all, believable."

[19] Uncut magazine ranked Gary Oldman as #8 in its "10 Best actors in rockin' roles" list, describing his portrayal as a "hugely sympathetic reading of the punk figurehead as a lost and bewildered manchild.

"[20] In 2011, Total Film said of the performance: "It's an early high point in Oldman's varied career that showed just what the young actor was made of.

Playing the part of an icon known and beloved by many comes with its own demands and risks, but Oldman more than rises to the challenge, completely transforming into the troubled punk bassist."

"[21] In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked Sid and Nancy as the third-best rock movie ever made,[22] and in 2014, ShortList named it the ninth-greatest music biopic of all time.

Leslie Halliwell reiterated a line from a review that appeared in Sight & Sound: "Relentlessly whingeing performances and a lengthy slide into drugs, degradation and death make this a solemnly off-putting moral tract.

"[24] Andrew Schofield was ranked #1 in Uncut magazine's "10 Worst actors in rockin' roles", which described his performance as Sex Pistols lead singer Johnny Rotten (real name John Lydon) as a "short-arse Scouse Bleasdale regular never once looking like he means it".

[28] Lydon commented on the film in his 1994 autobiography, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs: I cannot understand why anyone would want to put out a movie like Sid and Nancy and not bother to speak to me; Alex Cox, the director, didn't.

[29]Strummer claimed to have met with Alex Cox for the first time after the completion of the film, at a wrap party,[30] but this is not entirely accurate.

In Cox's own, 2008, autobiography he refuted Lydon's claim about not meeting before the film, stating that they enjoyed a 90-minute, alcohol-fuelled, discussion about the script, who should play 'Johnny Rotten', and other aspects of production.