Nothing Compares film review — Sinéad O’Connor’s defiant life in pop and protest

It’s been 263,000 hours and 10,960 days — give or take — since Sinéad O’Connor tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live. (A protest against the cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Catholic church.) That simple rending of a photograph, one that used to hang in her mother’s bedroom, was heard across the world, nearly enough to destroy the Irish singer-songwriter’s career as a pop star.

Not that O’Connor herself gave much of a toss, as we learn in Kathryn Ferguson’s rousing documentary. The elfin-featured performer, with a speaking voice that seldom rose above a whisper but lungs like a banshee when on stage, was a rebel from the start. As the film pieces together her story through archive montages, backed by the sound of a mature O’Connor, now 55, looking back in anger, sadness and amusement, we see that she always refused to be bossed around.

It started with shaving off her hair to defy her record company’s wish that she look more feminine. Likewise, she said no when the label suggested she have an abortion at 20, and continued ever onwards with outspoken dissent against racist acts by the UK police, protests against US foreign policy and campaigning for abortion rights in Ireland.

Ferguson is very effective in helping us to understand O’Connor’s complex character, shaped partly by the horrific emotional and physical abuse she experienced from her mother as a child. Put into care by her parents, she ended up in a children’s home that was attached to a care facility for survivors of the Magdalene Laundries, where “fallen” Irish women were forcibly interned until the 1990s. But, by happy accident, that placement led to O’Connor developing her musical talent thanks to a sympathetic teacher.

The movie doesn’t quite do that talent justice by leaning heavily on vague, superlative-heavy praise instead of a more nuanced examination of her technique and skill. And it doesn’t help that the estate that controls Prince’s music refused to let the film-makers include her powerful 1990 cover of his ballad “Nothing Compares 2 U”. Still, it’s fascinating to learn that the iconic moment in the song’s video, directed by John Maybury, when tears roll down her face was prompted by thinking not of a lover but about her recently deceased mother.

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas from October 7 and on Showtime in the US