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The voice of doom, the face of an angel, and a touch of Ilsa the She-Wolf of the SS -- that was the impression Nico made when she first entered pop consciousness as she intoned the lyrics to "Femme Fatale" on the first Velvet Underground album. It was a whiff of decadence going well beyond Warhol's Factory scene and as far back as Huysmans, if not Sodom and Gomorrah: both brittle and chic, and with a sinister, authentic chill of the crypt. As Susanne Ofteringer demonstrates in her rollicking and grave Nico Icon, the woman born Christa Päffgen in 1938 transcended her 15 minutes of superstardom to become a minor archetype of the latter half of the 20th century. Perhaps her most telling song was the one Lou Reed wrote for her, "I'll Be Your Mirror." Like the moral, medieval sculptures that combine a voluptuous female with a rotting corpse, Nico's perfect features reflected the longing for beauty and the inevitability of death.

With wit, restraint, and an ironic awe, Ofteringer captures this dichotomy from the film's beginning. A montage of stills of a teenage Nico modeling in Vogue -- astoundingly luminous, haughty, and fragile -- coalesce into the haggard valkyrie of the end, pumping at her virginal as she delivered her two-note hymns to indifferent audiences. James Young, the keyboardist for these often sordid last tours, primly relates tales of Nico shoving heroin up her ass at border crossings and assaulting her manager, Alan Wise, with a knife. "Behind everything," muses Wise, "was the desire for her own extinction. That was her aesthetic."

Such is also the aesthetic of our times, since its origins and Nico's are the same. A touching, scary interview with Helma Wolff, Nico's aunt and guardian, discloses the chanteuse's macabre childhood in war-ravaged Germany. Her father, a Wehrmacht soldier, died in 1943, apparently killed by the Nazis after suffering an untreatable head wound. Nico herself grew up under the blood red skies of a burning Berlin. Intercut with footage of bombed-out cities, Wolff tearfully sings along with a recording of Nico's "All Tomorrow's Parties," lamenting that someone so beautiful and gifted should end a failure.

Whether Nico was a failure Ofteringer does not presume to say, but the cause of Nico's downfall she ascribes not so much to the whims of history as to the dictates of fashion. Shown in snippets from Fellini's La dolce vita, from TV cognac ads, and from a pre-MTV clip of her singing Gordon Lightfoot's "I'm Not Saying," Nico came to the attention of Andy Warhol as a vacant object of feminine pulchritude. He featured her in his film Chelsea Girls and imposed her on the fledgling Velvet Underground, much to the consternation of members Lou Reed and John Cale. And yet Cale would be her longtime collaborator; at the end of Nico Icon he performs a haunting version of her "Frozen Warnings."

But as Nico's "bohemian" friend Carlos de Maldonado-Bostock points out, she wasn't satisfied with being an object. "One day she changed from being a blonde wearing white," recalls Warhol collaborator filmmaker Paul Morrissey, "the next she was henna'd and wearing black. Everyone told her she looked terrible." She would remain in the limelight for a while with her liaisons with past and future rock stars like Brian Jones, Jackson Browne, Jim Morrison ("my soul brother"), and the initially hostile Reed. Her erratic solo career, however, initiated her descent into willing obscurity, a heroin habit, an early death, and the apotheosis of myth.

These episodes Ofteringer relates with a bracing mingling of stills and vintage footage overlapped with interviews with some of the pop-cultural luminaries, has-beens, and never-weres who associated with her. At times the style can be too arch, as when she imitates the split-screen technique of Warhol's Chelsea Girls. Even then, she recovers nicely by ironically commenting on that affectation in an interview with Nico's lover, sideman, and heroin buddy from the '70s, Lutz Ulbrich. He sadly recalls their mutually destructive relationship as he watches home movies of the squalid Parisian apartment he shared with her. As he sits in the darkness next to the movie projector, the screen is split in half, the glowing void of the projector lamp on one side, his eyes gazing at the illusion of beauty on the other. Like everyone else who ever encountered her, he responds to Nico with resigned reverence and non-comprehending regret. In the end, Nico is like the abyss of Nietzsche's epigram: even as you look into it, it's also looking into you.

Click to read an interview with Susanne Ofteringer.