Nico, 1988

The radiant Danish actress Trine Dyrholm (best known to American audiences for Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration and The Greatest Heroes, and Susanne Bier’s In a Better World and Love is All You Need) delivers one of the year’s best performances as Christa Päffgen, the German singer, ex-model, one-time Andy Warhol muse, and former member of the Velvet Underground better known as Nico.  The film, Nico, 1988, by Italian writer/director Susanna Nicchiarelli, follows the middle-aged Christa, now drug addled and willfully stripped of her iconic beauty, on a listless tour of low-rent nightclubs around Europe. 

Like most good best biopics, Nico, 1988 doesn’t attempt to tell the entire life story of its protagonist. Rather Nicchiarelli limits the narrative to the last two years of Nico’s life— the same period covered in Susanne Ofteringer’s documentary Nico Icon (1995). Both pictures explore the aftermath of fame and the self-destruction of an individual. But Nico, 1988 presents a more celebratory perspective on its main character. There’s an admirable, if not exactly heroic, feminism in Christa’s unwillingness to be anything other than who she is—relishing the destruction of her beauty, performing music more often alienating than engaging, slyly negating while simultaneously embracing the part of Nico--capitalizing on her past fame by constantly dismissing it. 

The powerhouse performance at the center of Nico, 1988 elevates this modest film. Dyrholm inhabits Christa, in physicality, in spirit, and, most importantly, in voice. Despite her near zombie-like stage presence in all but one exceptional number, the picture comes most alive in scenes where Nico sings. Dyrholm mesmerizes with her ability to convey the intelligence and humanity escaping through the cracks of Nico’s almost comically flat, thickly accented, morose moan-singing. Though Nico is an extreme character, Dyrholm gives an understated, deeply nuanced performance.