The day James Young met Nico, she arrived at his doorstep with a mutual friend and asked to use his toilet. It was the early ’80s and Young, who would become Nico’s keyboard player and later publish a memoir about their years on the road, didn’t recognize her at first. Finally, by way of explaining why the heroin-addicted singer had spent so long in the bathroom, the friend discreetly informed him that she’d been in the Velvet Underground. “And then it all made sense,” Young recalled in the 1995 documentary Nico Icon. He soon followed Nico into “a little world inside a van, of absolute craziness,” as he describes it. “We were all planets revolving around her moon.”

This is the private solar system Italian filmmaker Susanna Nicchiarelli recreates in her biopic Nico, 1988, which screens next week at the Tribeca Film Festival. Its title references the year when the 49-year-old German musician, actress, and model born Christa Päffgen died after suffering a heart attack while biking in Ibiza. But Nicchiarelli devotes little time to Nico’s demise, focusing instead on the notorious low-budget global tours that sustained her during the last years of her life. In a van with her band, manager, and sometimes her troubled adult son, Ari, Danish actress Trine Dyrholm’s Nico is a larger-than-life figure squished down to human size.

By that point, Andy Warhol’s “Pop Girl of ’66” had long since traded her icy-blonde beauty and New York glamour for mousy hair, an age-appropriate body, and the freedom to write her own melancholy songs. “My life started after my experience with the Velvet Underground,” the singer insists in the film. Living in bleak, industrial Manchester, she struggled to shake her 15-year addiction and care for Ari, whom she’d introduced to heroin years earlier. Yet Nico, 1988 isn’t the tragedy of a beautiful young woman losing her looks, youth, and fame so much as an effort to understand why she became so desperate to rid herself of those apparent blessings.

In that sense, Nicchiarelli’s film is part of the larger reconsideration of Nico’s post-VU art and life that began in earnest with Nico Icon, directed by Susanne Ofteringer, and has accelerated in the past decade. John Cale, who collaborated with Nico throughout her career, staged tribute concerts in London and New York that emphasized her ’70s recordings. In 2012, Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti of Throbbing Gristle marked the band’s final dissolution and the death of their bandmate Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson by releasing the trio’s full-album cover of Nico’s Desertshore. Patti Smith joined her daughter, Jesse Paris Smith, and the experimental group Soundwalk Collective to reimagine Nico’s songs in 2016’s Killer Road, a multimedia performance and album inspired by the icon’s poetic demise. Meanwhile, a new generation of music critics is revisiting her solo records and finding many of them on par with the best albums by Cale and Lou Reed.

For those of us born too late to have witnessed the final chapters of Nico’s story, who first encountered her as an icon of ’60s cool on The Velvet Underground & Nico and her debut solo album, Chelsea Girl, it wasn’t necessarily obvious that her legacy was in need of rehabilitation. But by the ’80s, she’d become a punchline. Her old friend Warhol dismissed her as a “fat junkie.” In his book Nico, Songs They Never Play on the Radio, Young recounts a disastrous 1986 show in Australia that ended with the promoter offering his recording for a live album. “With all that heckling?” Young asked, incredulous. “Especially with the heckling,” the guy replied. “Novelty market, mate.”