Courtesy Showtime
Most people of a certain age remember where they were during the aftermath of Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor’s infamous 1992 performance on Saturday Night Live. You know the one—when she ripped up a picture of then-Pope John Paul II while performing a cover of Bob Marley’s “War,” itself derived from a 1963 Haile Selassie speech to the United Nations.
“Fight the real enemy,” she said directly into the camera as she tore the photo to bits. Today it seems tame as far as protests go—not to mention how right she was insofar as the Catholic church totally was covering up child abuse. But back then, O’Connor became an early example of what we now refer to as cancel culture. Who can say whether her career ever fully recovered?
The SNL thing isn’t the bedrock of the new Showtime documentary about O’Connor, Nothing Compares, but it does make it worth signing up for the streaming service (even on a trial basis) and further represents a turning point in what is otherwise a film about the singer’s meteoric rise and sudden drop-off. In a phrase, O’Connor was (and actually continues to be) punk as fuck, a trailblazingly smart songwriter and force who escaped the clutches of an abusive mother as a child and turned her heart-wrenching experiences into the sort of songs that connect people. In filmmaker Kathryn Ferguson’s vision of O’Connor, she’s downright heroic, from her toying with gender norms and confronting feminine hairstyle ridiculousness to her careening and powerful caterwauling on pretty much every album since 1987′s The Lion and the Cobra. The live footage is intense, too!
Ferguson takes us through O’Connor’s early days and band heights, through television and private footage, to showcase a more intimate portrait of the notoriously reclusive singer than we’ve ever seen. This is the woman who dyed a Public Enemy logo into the side of her head for a performance at the Grammys the year the historic hip-hop group boycotted the awards over the lack of a rap category; the woman who declined to have the American national anthem play before a festival appearance. This is the woman who stood steadfast in the face of tens of thousands of booing audience members at Madison Square Garden in ‘92 and repeated those words from the same Selassie speech she performed on SNL. In other words, if you can know who O’Connor is and not feel empowered and inspired by her fearless commitment to speaking her mind, saying what’s right and releasing total bangers...well, maybe you’re on the wrong side of history, pal.
Sadly, the doc glosses over some key happenings, such as O’Connor’s son’s 2022 death. Sure, the film might have been in the can before that happened, but it only released now, toward the end of the year, and its absence is noteworthy. We also don’t get much of a sense of what happened in O’Connor’s personal relationships outside of that with her mother—and it’s a tough pill to swallow that the Prince estate denied the film the rights to play O’Connor’s version of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” clearly her biggest hit, a landmark music video and, frankly, a killer tune.
No matter, though, because the song remains the same: We don’t often get a talent of O’Connor’s magnitude, particularly one with important things to say.
7
+Emotional and inspiring; great music
-A lot left unsaid
Nothing Compares
Directed by Ferguson
Showtime, NR, 97 min.
