D.O.A.

Lech Kowalski followed the last American tour of the Sex Pistols with a handheld camera through a seven-city southern run, shooting without the permission of the group or its record company. He then went to England and filmed other punk bands, Generation X and Sham 69 among them. In the middle of the film sits a short interview with Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, and that footage became the most cited part of the documentary. Kowalski mixes concert and news material with images from the fashion capitals and with people on the street, and what emerges is both the rise of a movement and its dispersal. Sid Vicious and the man who financed the film both died before it was finished, and by the time it opened in New York in 1981 every band in it had broken up.