Nico, 1988

• Trine Dyrholm - Nico
• John Gordon Sinclair - Richard
• Anamaria Marinca - Sylvia
• Sandor Funtek - Ari
• Thomas Trabacchi - Domenico
• Karina Fernandez - Laura

The movie was a collaboration between the director and main actress Trine Dyrholm; they co-created the character. Dyrholm stated: "We created this version of Nico together".[3] Dyrholm sang all the songs in the movie; she restructured the music with a musician and a band. They worked into a music studio before shooting.[4] Nicchiarelli did a lot of research and she flew to Manchester to meet Nico's manager. She also interviewed Nico's son, Ari. He read the first draft and later the final script.[5]

The film was shot in the square format instead of rectangular format. Nicchiarelli explained: "One of the main choices was the atmosphere of the second half of the 1980s which is very interesting; it has the decadence and the quality of the VHS. They worked on the quality of the VHS and tried to reproduce that, that kind of feeling. VHS and television are square format and it forces you to stay on the characters. I think it is interesting when cinema goes back to the square. Lately, some of the best films I've seen are square".[5]

Nicchiarelli used images of the real Nico's face and early video footage of Jonas Mekas. She wrote to him and he answered her immediately. Nicchiarelli said: "It is fun to work with archive material in fiction movies".[5]

The movie went to general release in the US in early August 2018. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 94% based on 62 reviews, with an average rating of 7.2/10. The website's critical consensus reads; "Nico, 1988 takes an absorbing – and appropriately idiosyncratic – look at the singer's later years."[6] On Metacritic, the film has an average weighted score of 75 out of 100, based on 21 critics, indicating "favorable reviews".[7]

Dyrholm, who played Nico, received critical acclaim for her performance. Variety hailed her as "a powerhouse of authenticity. Her moroseness is mesmerizing, but she also gives Nico a tense intelligence, and her singing is uncanny."[2] The Los Angeles Times also raved about Dyrholm as "an actress of formidable presence", giving "strong, truthful, unflinching performance that powers the film the way Christa's energy powered the bands she was in those late days".[8] The New York Times also praised how Dyrholm was photographed in "brutally unforgiving close-up", saying that it "fully captures the faded charisma of the singer" in the last year of her existence.[9] Joe Morgenstern in Wall Street Journal emphased, saying: "I’ve never seen a performance quite like it — unsparingly harsh, but also graceful, droll and tender, a portrait of soul-weariness laced with a yearning for salvation."[10]

At the Venice Film Festival in 2017, it won the Orrizonti Award for Best Film.[11] At the Donatellos in 2018, (which work in Italy on the same criteria as the Oscars), it won the Best Original Script award,[12] and was nominated in the Best Films category.[13] At the 9th Magritte Awards, it received a nomination in the category of Best Foreign Film in Coproduction.[14]

• Nico, 1988 on IMDb
• Nico, 1988 at Box Office Mojo
• Nico, 1988 at Metacritic
• Nico, 1988 at Rotten Tomatoes