Beauty And The Beast: Bare Portrait Of The Cult Figure Nico

For those who look back, Nico stood out as the enigmatic icon of the decadent 1960s. She was an amazing beauty whose tragic life was a journey — paradoxically — through most of the icons of cinema, music and the avant garde. She was a model, actor, and a singer; and each every one of those roles was unique.

Marked by decades-long heavy drug addiction, Nico represented the dark, nihilistic side of the rock and the art world. Known as the singer of The Velvet Underground, she left a powerful legacy, influencing many singers in the counter culture, such as Siouxsie and the Banshees, Patti Smith, Morrissey, Björk, Dead Can Dance, Marcus Reeves, Marianne Faithfull, etc.

Her life, described as 'an extended longing for death', ended when she was only 50 years old. 

Now, she is revisited in a striking documentary, titled Nico 1988.

As portrayed in the film, Nico also possessed an inner life as strange and haunted as her music. It’s captured in exquisite detail by the Danish actor Trine Dyrholm, who plays the star and sings all of her songs. Though she neither looks like nor sounds exactly like Nico, she nails her sad and dreamy core... Unlike every previous dramatic portrayal of the star, which focused on her Dolce Vita years, when she attracted lovers from Jim Morrison to Jackson Browne to Alain Delon, Nico 1988 chronicles the final two, uncelebrated years of life. By then, she was an addict, shooting heroin into whatever covert part of her body she hadn’t yet poked. 

She was raped by an American soldier when she was 15, which left her ice cold — even hostile to life. A mesmerizing beauty, she was discovered a year later by a photographer, and from then on her journey through who's who from 1950s on in the art world began. Her image left a mark on everyone who defined the 1960s.

This one is the story of a movie that immortalizes a defiant, cranky, paranoid, reckless and rebelllious heroine.