“Nothing Compares,” the documentary about Sinead O’Connor that premiered at the virtual 2022 Sundance Film Festival on Friday, is a movie that is both timely and curiously out of time. It’s a potent film that explores the roots of the brilliant but troubled Irish singer, who’s been back in the news recently with the suicide of her teenage son and her own hospitalization, but it also turns her recent years into an afterthought, bypassing many of the highs and lows that led her here over the last two decades.
It has an upbeat ending of sorts, painting O’Connor as a survivor who is now receiving her due, and that part necessarily feels hollow the week after she went to a hospital after making her own threats of self-harm. But “Nothing Compares”She does make a convincing case for herself as a formidable artist, self destructive but indomitable. While the portrait of her childhood at her family’s hands and at her church makes clear why and how she ended her life as haunted as it clearly shows.
The film, a first feature from director Kathryn Ferguson, begins with O’Connor’s appearance at the Bob Dylan 30th anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden in 1992, when Kris Kristofferson introduced her by saying “her name has become synonymous with courage and integrity.” The applause that followed was almost drowned out by an avalanche of boos, because she’d torn up a picture of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live”Two weeks earlier
But when a shaken O’Connor steps away from the microphone as the boos rain down on her, the film jumps back in time to explore the twin stories that were intertwined throughout her life: her passion for music and her hatred for the damage she traced to the Catholic Church in Ireland and its effect on her family.
O’Connor and people close to her speak in interviews that are voice only; while she’s seen talking in archival material, her more recent comments are off-camera in the style of films like Asif Kapadia’s “Amy.”Interviews are often intercut with moody, soft-focus and often melodramatic reenactments, especially in the early stages.
Her musical inspirations, she says, came from her father who sang old folk songs like “Scarlet Ribbons” to her brother bringing home Bob Dylan’s “born-again” 1979 album, “Slow Train Coming.” “I didn’t want to become a pop star,”She said. “I wanted to scream.” And if the pain behind that comment was what drove O’Connor, it was also a key to her appeal: From the start, her voice often had a fragile, ethereal grace, but it could also rage.
Her fury, she makes it clear in “Nothing Compares,” came from her upbringing — initially from beatings at the hands of her mother, a deeply religious woman who was also disturbed and emotionally, psychologically and physically abusive. O’Connor became obsessed with the Bible – because, she said, “I wanted to see what was in this book that they were using to oppress my people.”
Wild child, she was sent to a “care home” at the age of 14, but the brutal institution turned out to be linked with one of Ireland’s infamous “Magdalene laundries,”Homes where teenage girls were forced to work after getting pregnant out of the wedlock were sent. Her descriptions of this time – particularly of old women who spent their nights crying out for nurses who never came to them – are wrenching, and they haunt the rest of the film.
She also learned from that experience the first song she ever wrote. “Take My Hand,”O’Connor was then recorded by In Tua Nua, an Irish group. This helped to bring her to the attention the Irish record industry. But O’Connor, wounded and defiant as she was, couldn’t shut up and play along: When an executive at her first record company asked her to grow her hair long, wear short skirts and write inoffensive songs, she shaved her head, refused to play the good girl and wrote songs like the furious “Troy,”These are the things she said. “It’s not a song, it’s a f—ing testament.”
Her first album was a hit, but her second – 1990’s “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” – was a watershed moment personally, professionally and commercially. Its centerpiece was an intense performance of the ballad “Nothing Compares 2 U,”Prince wrote this song for a side project. O’Connor’s version went to No. 1 around the world, buoyed by a video best known for the moment in which a tear runs down O’Connor’s face as the sings the final lines in stark closeup.
The film plays up the song and the moment, but there’s something missing. As you see footage from the video, with a long, suspended chord playing in the background and presumably serving as an intro to the song itself, it may slowly dawn on you that you’re watching O’Connor sing the song but never Hearing her do it, and that the chord you’re hearing never actually shifts into the opening of the song. Which is to say, it becomes clear that Prince’s estate wouldn’t give permission for the filmmakers to use the biggest hit of O’Connor’s career, and the song from which the film takes its title.
“Nothing Compares” admits as much in the end credits, though the film never gets into the spat between O’Connor and Prince that no doubt led to that refusal. She has stated that Prince and she got into a fight after he told them to stop using. “bad words”Interviews reveal that he was actually a kind guy and hit her with something hard hidden in a pillowcase. A recent Interview with New York TimesHe was called by her “a violent abuser of women.”)
After “Nothing Compares 2 U”Stardom followed by the rise to stardom. “SNL” appearance where she tore up a picture of the Pope that she’d taken off the wall the day her mother died years earlier. The immediate backlash was swift and severe, both for “SNL”She refused to take the stage at a Florida event if the National Anthem had been played before hers. Her next album fell off the charts quickly (it didn’t help that it was a big-band album of standards), and then she was gone.
She was, at the very least, gone from the spotlight of pop-culture and the record industry. She continued working – seven more albums, plus some collaborations, soundtrack recordings and acting jobs – but “Nothing Compares”Sticks to her rise and falls, and almost ignores her curious second act of the last 20 years.
And that’s a shame – because by focusing on the years leading up to her fall from grace and then bypassing what came after, the film in a sense writes her off even as it tries to celebrate her. It is clear that she deserved much more respect than she got and that she had very good reasons to do all the things that earned her that label. “crazy” – and then it takes away the second half of her career because the first half makes better copy.
(After I had finished the movie, I started to watch it again. “Theology,”Listen to haunting tracks like “The Nightmare”, her 2007 album that is spooky, deeply religious and disturbing. “If You Had a Vineyard”While wishing that the movie would have told me more about them.
It was a conscious decision to focus on her early career early on. Maybe the latter days will be a basis for a sequel. But the decision feels off now; it’d be valuable to fill in the blanks now, as O’Connor faces additional heartbreak and finds her own health precarious once more.
Instead, we get a round of testimonials from the likes of Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna and Public Enemy’s Chuck D, along with footage of Irish officials publicly apologizing for the Magdalene laundries and some defiant words from O’Connor herself: “They tried to bury me. They didn’t realize I was a seed.”
Those words may still prove to be true, but the line of O’Connor’s that lingers after seeing “Nothing Compares”Cuts faster and comes earlier. “We do not know what we’re doing,”She says: “when we scoff at our children’s keening.”
“Nothing Compares”The 2022 Sundance Film Festival will host its world premiere.