'NICO ICON' A FASCINATING PORTRAIT OF SELF-DESTRUCTION.

Byline: Stephen Holden The New York Times

As sad as it is to watch someone endowed with beauty, talent and intelligence go down in flames, there is also something darkly reassuring in the drama of a golden being who willfully self-destructs.

That voyeuristic fascination with doomed glamour is one of the guilty pleasures of Susanne Ofteringer's utterly haunting documentary film, "Nico Icon," which opens Friday.

Examining the unhappy life of Christa Paffgen, the German singer, songwriter, model and occasional actress who reinvented herself as Nico, the film locates the void at the heart of modern demi-celebrity.

As a performer with the Velvet Underground and as a chiseled blond goddess fiddling with her hair in "The Chelsea Girls," Nico was the most stunningly beautiful and enigmatic of Andy Warhol's 1960s "superstars."

In a solo musical career that never took off commercially, Nico carried Marlene Dietrich's world-weary hauteur to an icy extreme on recordings in which she moaned her sepulchral speech-song in a deep, foggy voice that wove a death-entranced spell.

During the 1970s, Nico became a heroin addict. She died in 1988 at age 49.

The documentary's most chilling stories, told by James Young, her keyboard player for five years, describe the singer's horrifying knife fights with her manager on a tour bus filled with drug paraphernalia.

Calling Nico "the queen of the bad girls," Young insists that the singer was proud of the fact that "her teeth were rotten, her hair was gray, her skin was bad and she had needle tracks all over." And in the film's excerpts from a 1986 interview, Nico, who announces that her only regret in life was having been born a woman instead of a man, looks scary, but still striking.

As the film follows Nico from her German childhood through a rootless bohemian life in Paris, where she worked as a model, to New York and then back to Europe, a portrait emerges of a woman who seems to have been born disaffected.Nico's air of nonchalance, far from being a chic pose, reflected a profound spiritual emptiness.

After Nico bore a son, Ari, by the French actor Alain Delon, who refused to acknowledge his paternity, she proved to be a careless mother who fed the child a diet of potato chips. Delon's mother took over his care. Many years later.

Nico always seemed to have been drawn toward death. At the height of her post-Velvet Underground fame, she had an obsessive relationship with Jim Morrison, who at their first meeting involved her in a stoned ritual during which she wondered if he was trying to kill her.

Enthralling and spooky, "Nico Icon" includes many other comparably eerie reminiscences. In the end, its subject emerges as an embodiment of the aimlessness and morbid languor that were the shadow side of the 1960s' unbridled hedonism.

THE FACTS

The film: "Nico Icon" (not rated).

The stars: Featuring interviews with John Cale, Jackson Browne, Paul Morrissey, Viva, Billy Name, Tina Aumont, Ari Boulogne, Jonas Mekas and Sterling Morrison.

Behind the scenes:Written (in English, German and French, with English subtitles) and directed by Susanne Ofteringer.

Running time: One hour, 15 minutes.

Playing: Nuart theater, West L.A.

Our rating: Three Stars.