Netflix's 'The Dirt' Does No Justice to Mötley Crüe's Wild Legacy
If you'll let me, I'd like to save you 100 minutes of your time. This weekend, when you think about watching The Dirt, the new Mötley Crüe biopic on Netflix, don't. And it's not because it's demeaning towards women, or that it condones outlandish rock 'n' roll antics, that's so bothersome. It does both of those things, but then again, this is Mötley Crüe we're talking about here. Even though the film embraces mirrors covered in coke, syringes full of heroin, and plenty of female nudity, The Dirt never stops feeling like the bedtime story version of Mötley Crüe’s reign.
That’s because it is. The four actors-Colson Baker (aka Machine Gun Kelly) as Tommy Lee, Iwan Rheon (aka Ramsay Bolton from Game of Thrones) as guitarist Mick Mars, Daniel Webber as lead singer Vince Neil, and Douglas Booth as bassist Nikki Sixx-come off like endearing rascals who love taking off their pants in public as much as they do a new bag of blow. Somehow, despite there being one scene in which Tommy Lee punches his fiancée in the face and another in which Vince Neil, while driving under the influence of anywhere from five-to-ten substances, gets into a car wreck which kills Hanoi Rocks drummer Nicholas “Razzle” Dingley, I wasn’t offended once while watching Jeff Tremaine’s adaption.
I never felt bad for their manager Doc McGhee, played by David Costabile, who had to resort to literally handcuffing his artists to their beds to keep track of them before ultimately getting fired. I never felt bad for their label rep Zutaut, played by Pete Davidson, not even when Neil has sex with his girlfriend. Come to think of it, I didn’t even feel bad when Sixx hooked up with Lee’s fiancée right before he met his parents!
Which, if you’ve read the book, you know is a problem.
The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band, the 2001 book written by journalist Neil Strauss in partnership with all four members of the band, is highly offensive. It is full of vile, problematic, and super illegal things. There is a scene in which Nikki Sixx recalls a rape story, in which in the middle of having sex with a woman, he has Lee take his place. (He has since stated that he neither remembers that event nor telling Strauss about the event; he had relapsed and was using both drugs and alcohol during his interviews for the project. Sixx is now a sober and dedicates much of his time to educating about opioid addiction.) And there is real darkness. At times, it’s heavy read, one that grapples with addiction and sobriety and excess and ego.
“I think it’s a story of survival,” Sixx told Rolling Stone this month, speaking of the memoir and film. “It’s the story of a gang of unlikely characters that climbed a mountain together only to self-implode and have to figure it out. We really are a four-headed monster and sometimes we just fucking bite each other.”
He’s right, but really only for the book. The movie never inspires you to root for anyone. It never even makes you hate anyone, which it should. You never feel like the men are lucky for being alive-not even Sixx, who literally died of a heroin overdose in 1987 before being revived with shots of adrenaline straight to the chest.
The problem might very well be that the real Mötley Crüe story simply isn’t an R-rated tale. That putting it into film in 2019 runs the risk of being banned from any respectable platform. Or, since since the famous self-mythologizers were involved in the production of the film-all of them are co-producers, and all are very different from the maniacs they were at their peak-it's not out of the question that they would want to clean up their own legacy, retroactively.
Lucky for us, the original story still exists. And if reading it feels like too much a task, there’s also a beyond wild Behind the Music from 1998 on the group that you can check out. Alternatively, here are 25 biopics about musicians that totally rock.
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