Nothing Compares

Directed by Kathryn Ferguson

Running time: 1hr36 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Sinead O’Connor in Nothing Compares

When I was 10 or 11, my parents rather imaginatively gave me a CD of Sinead O’Connor’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got for Christmas. I had been taken with her voice — like pretty much everyone else with access to a radio — when “Nothing Compares 2 U” had topped every chart in sight a few years before, but otherwise knew little about her or her music. I’d been too young and too far away to absorb the media uproar over her tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II on American TV; her fierce lyrics about personal trauma and political fury often went over my pre-teen head. But I was moved enough by what I heard to become quite fascinated with her; as I grew into a full-fledged fan over the years, I pieced together her history in patches, her music changing and deepening to me with that knowledge.

In conjunction with O’Connor's recent autobiography, Kathryn Ferguson’s fine, heart-rending documentary Nothing Compares conclusively sets the singer’s troubled story straight, often in her own words — thus disentangling it from years of malicious media bias regarding her personal principles, conflicted religious beliefs and mental illness. The world is a different place from how it was in 1992, when her protests against the abuse of women and children within the Catholic Church were dismissed in the mainstream as the ravings of an insolent madwoman. Using a straightforward talking-heads format that gets a boost from the singer’s present-day narration, Ferguson also applies a post-MeToo lens to the story of a teenager who shaved her head to limit the options of stylists who wanted to sex her up, and who had a baby against the wishes of her record label bosses. Most affectingly, the documentary captures the inner confusion of a sudden, startled star who both knew her own mind and feared losing it.

Too many rock docs cram too much in, winding up like very well-soundtracked Wikipedia pages as they check off every biographical beat. Stacked as it is with rich archival material, music videos and performance footage from the tumultuous first five years of her career, Nothing Compares cuts out early, leaving new O’Connor converts to discover for themselves the personal and professional zig-zags (amid a continued stream of interesting if notably less popular music) that followed her peak of international infamy. Yet it has her voice throughout — still haunting, a little more weathered, thoroughly uncowed — to bridge past and present, to remind us that she made it through. In a genre of documentary that tends to thrive on tragedy and waste, Nothing Compares has a welcome spirit of endurance.

NOTHING COMPARES (2022) Written by Eleanor Emptage, Kathryn Ferguson, Michael Mallie | Shot by Luke Jacobs | Edited by Mick Mahon