A few months ago, Netflix premiered The Dirt, the biopic about Mötley Crüe, based on the eponymous book written by the four members over fifteen years ago. The idea of adapting it to the big screen existed for a decade and was in "development hell" until Netflix decided to put the tarasca. The result?
Anyone who wants to know the genesis of the band can rest faster and better with Wikipedia, however (I adjust the monocle and follow), here is a brief summary.
Like Bohemian Rhapsody and 99% of the biopics of the style, The Dirt starts telling us the story of one of the members. The most important within the band. In the case of Mötley Crüe, his bass player Nikki Sixx. Nikki (Douglas Booth) was born with the name Frank Feranna until, finally trying to get away from a horrible life full of abuse, he is legally changed to his artistic name and with which he would hit his first hits as a London bassist. Nikki meets Tommy Lee (rapper Machine Gun Kelly), a prodigious drummer, from a loving family that supports his follies. It would have been interesting if the adaptation played with this counterpoint. Both want a serious project and so they incorporate the rest of the band, the serious and older Mick Mars (Iwan Rheon) on guitar and Vince Neil (Daniel Webber) in the voice.
The four get instant fame for their live chemistry, their appeal and why not say it, the time.
Apparently in the 80s the world wanted people to break everything. Design drugs had something to do with it.
The Dirt is not so much a day-to-day exercise of the band, as it is night to night. Mötley Crüe was an equation of music with a party in which the latter prevailed by the personality of three of the four members. The culture of the quilombo, the partuza, the uncontrolled merca mixed with hectoliters of alcohol, and of course, the marketing of all this.
No one would assume that record labels would endure such fools for so many years if they had not been designed in a laboratory. A pinch of Kiss, a spoonful of Alice Cooper, half a kilo of cocaine cut with the worst moments of Pete Townshend and there is Mötley Crüe, terrorizing hotel maids for anyone else's amusement other than their fans. Interestingly, the same and unique that will enjoy this film in its full spectrum.
I am not establishing by this that which boy band Mötley Crüe is a lie that the Elektra label was invented although it is known that several of the first quilombos armed by Sixx, Neil, Lee and Mars have been revealed as marketing moves. Well, it is known: you reach the front page of newspapers faster with a scandal than with a disc.
Of course, at some point, those “PR Stunts,” as the Yankees tell him, became real. The multiple addiction of its four members could not end badly and as the story is well known, I just point out how badly it is. The director of The Dirt is Jeff Tremaine, known for directing many "Jackass" movies. This only leads me to think that The Dirt could have been filmed by Spike Jonze, which might not have given a good movie but better executed. For long passages it looks like a biopic paid by Hallmark, when a film about one of the groups with the best live shows deserved another deployment. At various times, Los Angeles, omnipresent in the history of Crüe and also completely protagonist in the lifestyle, seems like a tiny, sunny but irrelevant and gray city. The first minutes of the movie tell us about the Sunset Strip and the bars where the idea of the band (and other tens of the genre) originated. You can't talk about glam metal and specifically about Mötley Crüe without the scenery of LA and Hollywood in the background, as grunge history cannot be told without Seattle. It is unintelligible that Netflix has not given us its already classic and inflatable drone scenes to accompany a story that without the background city cannot be explained.
For these reasons, The Dirt is a mediocre movie. Mötley Crüe is a product that cannot survive or be understood outside its time and its geography. Nikki Sixx was poorly chosen to carry the weight that Freddie Mercury carries in Bohemian Rhapsody (not surprisingly, Queen is a great visual influence of Mötley and even shared producers), and perhaps the relationship with Tommy Lee, an affectionate family with a military father and A sister musician and drummer too (Athena Lee), would have been a more coherent vehicle. From a good rock-loving boy to a busted son of a female beater. Who knows. We are the decisions we make, Tremaine will think. The Mötley took theirs and sold 50 million records. What the fuck do I know.