(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Mon 29 September 2025 14:15, UK
For a performer who nearly packed the whole acting gig in, Josh Brolin managed to carve an impressive ‘comeback’.
Remembered for his teen role in 1985’s The Goonies, a dissatisfied appearance in Thrashin’ two years later prompted a distance from the film industry altogether, Brolin finding plenty of minor TV work and warmly received stage productions. Following a string of low-key credits in half-remembered features across the 1990s and early 2000s, a key cast in 2007’s No Country for Old Men would herald his return, before long balancing the likes of Thanos in the Avengers universe to Oliver Stone’s character study of President George Bush in W.
Always seeming like a cool guy in interviews and press junkets, a chance to hang out and talk movies would no doubt prove a scintillating and educational exchange, Brolin as much a cinephile as he is a Hollywood star. Thankfully, a recent feature in Criterion’s Closet Picks series presented the next best thing: Brolin let loose among the prestigious library of DVDs and Blu-rays and highlighting the movies that stand tall in his estimation. Among selections including Traffic, Mikey and Nicky, and Lost Highway, Brolin plumps for two efforts from British director Alex Cox.
Selecting 1984’s Los Angeles punk sci-fi caper Repo Man first, Brolin then devotes much of his appraisal of Cox’s legacy by picking his follow-up, Sid & Nancy, from Criterion’s hallowed shelves. Starring Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb, Cox’s stylised biopic attempts to capture the torrid romance between Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and his troubled girlfriend Nancy Spungen, spiralling into a downward whirlwind of heroin abuse while living in New York’s Hotel Chelsea.
While the case of Spungen’s death from a stab wound in her abdomen is inconclusive, the film depicts Vicious carrying out the attack during an opiate-fugged fight, leaving intentions ambiguous.
Celebrating Roger Deakins’ cinematography, having worked with each other on five pictures and confessing to becoming “close friends”, Brolin recalled one key sequence from Sid & Nancy that had left an impression on him when first watching nearly 40 years ago as an 18-year-old: “I remember there was a great sequence of the trash falling down in this alleyway, this slow-motion sequence, and it’s never left me since the first time I saw it…”
The scene in question is the alleyway shot of Vicious and Spungen kissing in an alleyway as Prayers for Rain’s ‘Taxi to Heaven’ plays, their silhouettes embracing against the sharp light amid a surreal rain of garbage and debris, an evocative and illustrative vignette of the couple’s self-destructive, gutter passions.
While enjoying rave critical acclaim and entering a perennial life in punk cultdom, the Sex Pistols themselves had little positive to say, with frontman John Lydon especially loathing its perceived glamorisation of drug addiction. But Brolin remains one of Sid & Nancy’s biggest fans: “It’s movies like this that made me want to be involved in the movie industry. And it’s movies like this that remind me what we put ourselves through to be good actors.”
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