Review: 'Nothing Compares' artfully relives the most intense part of Sinead O'Connor's career, with bracing commentary from O'Connor today
The documentary “Nothing Compares” shows you everything you think you know about Irish singer Sinead O’Connor from her breakout in 1987 to her infamous career-derailing 1993 appearance on “Saturday Night Live.”
But what’s most fascinating about director Kathryn Ferguson’s intimate profile is how much it reveals that people don’t know about O’Connor — much of it from O’Connor’s own mouth.
O’Connor’s voice today — gruff and aged, and about an octave lower than the banshee wail that made her famous — is heard via audio through most of this impressionistic documentary, describing her tough childhood. O’Connor cites her Catholic upbringing, the oppressive grip Holy Mother Church had on the Irish and particularly its women, and the generations of abuse handed down from her grandmother to her mother to her.
Music, which she learned from her father, was her lifeline, and her ticket out of Dublin. Non-traditional female singers were unheard of in Ireland, and O’Connor’s only chance to sing the music she wanted to was to go to London. She joined her first band in Ireland, Ton Ton Macoute, and attracted the attention of a label and a manager, which got her to London, where she worked on her debut album, “The Lion and the Cobra,” and met drummer John Reynolds, who became the father to her first child, Jake, when she was 20.
O’Connor talks candidly about how her pregnancy upset her record label, who she said suggested she get an abortion. She also discusses how she defied feminine norms with her image, from shaving her head to wearing leather jackets and Doc Martens boots.
It was O’Connor’s second album, “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” that yielded her breakthrough hit, her cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Everyone in the film talks about the song, and the way it lit O’Connor’s career like a rocket. What the movie doesn’t do is play the song — Prince’s estate wouldn’t let them.
The most important job Ferguson performs is to set O’Connor’s actions and career in context, of both the times and her personal story. That’s no more apparent than discussing her 1993 appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” when she ended a song by tearing up a photo of Pope John Paul II. The moment torpedoed her career, but she says, in interviews then and now, that she doesn’t regret it. Considering how much has come out about the Catholic Church’s decades of abuse of children in Ireland, it’s time for a lot of people to admit that she had a point.
Ferguson’s film doesn’t delve into the rest of O’Connor’s sometimes bizarre life after 1993, which might be for the best considering her personal struggles in recent years. What it does deliver, a concentrated punch of O’Connor’s combative personality and fierce defense of herself during the most intense part of her career, is fascinating and impossible to turn away from.
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‘Nothing Compares’
★★★1/2
Starts streaming on Friday, September 30; airs on Showtime on Sunday, October 2. Not rated, but probably R for strong language and some disturbing imagery. Running time: 96 minutes.