Nothing Compares review: The passion and the fury of Sinéad O'Connor
Alanis, Janet, Britney, Monica Lewinsky: The last few years have handed us all kinds of receipts for the way girls and young women caught up in the hurricane eye of turn-of-the-millennium pop culture were treated, and it wasn't pretty. Like a lot of those recent projects, the new Sinéad O'Connor documentary Nothing Compares (streaming Sept. 30 on Showtime) feels like both a time capsule and a reckoning — the cautionary tale of yet another disobedient female who dared to step out of line and paid the price with her career, her reputation, and in O'Connor's case, nearly her life.
Director Kathryn Ferguson (Taking the Waters) initially casts Compares in a solid Behind the Music mold, tracing the singer's path from her Dickensian Dublin girlhood with an abusive and mentally ill mother through the group care homes where she spent much of her teenage years, and an escape to London by 19 for her first recording contract. By 20, she had also had her first child, though the label she was signed to did their best to prevent that; one of the movie's many revelations (if you haven't read O'Connor's bestselling 2021 memoir Rememberings) is that they tried very hard to get her to end the pregnancy, inconvenient as it was to their marketing plans for her 1987 debut.
Sheila Rock Photography/Courtesy of SHOWTIME
That the music industry is a viper pit, sadly, is not news. In the end she kept her baby, and the label's gross overreach, at least, helped her land on the look that would become her signature. (They wanted her to be more traditionally feminine; she picked up the clippers instead.) Even bald-headed, Sinéad was crushingly beautiful — in fact, shaving it all off seemed to crystallize her persona in more ways than one — and archival footage aptly captures that. But Ferguson also takes care to trace the creative evolution of a girl who even as a waifish teenager could stop time with her voice, a towering instrument that scaled from a lullaby whisper to an almost extraterrestrial wail. Music, the singer admits, was her form of therapy, "which was why it was such a shock when I became a pop star. That's not what I wanted. I just wanted to scream."
She did more than that, though her habitual outspokenness on the Catholic Church, child abuse, and various other third-rail topics most peers in her orbit wouldn't come near reached its notorious peak on Saturday Night Live in 1992 when she tore up a photograph of the Pope, intoning "Fight the real enemy" as she stared down the camera. It would be nearly a decade before John Paul II publicly acknowledged the truth of that abuse and how deep it went institutionally, an admission that came too late for O'Connor. Calling the media pile-on that followed a modern martyrdom would be an overstatement, maybe, but it's still devastating to watch: At barely 23, with a toddler on her hip and the full weight of global stardom on her head, this earnest young Irishwoman still figuring out her politics was cast as an ungrateful agitator, a heretic, and worse.
Ferguson has the singer herself as a frequent narrator vividly laying out these memories firsthand, along with a well-curated selection of friends, bandmates, and famous admirers in voiceover, though no talking heads. The film loses a little something in the basic-cable recreations of Sinéad's childhood it uses to fill those gaps, and leaves out large swathes of her biography too, including several later marriages and children, a bipolar-disorder diagnosis, and an eventual conversion to Islam. (The defining song of O'Connor's career, ironically, is missing as well; Prince's estate, which owns the songwriting rights, refused to allow its usage.) But as an intimate, often infuriating portrait of an artist and era, it's hard to argue with the raw power of the story on screen — and the timeliness of it too, no matter how long overdue. Grade: B+
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