PLOT: The hedonistic, true story of Mötley Crüe– Vince Neil (Daniel Webber), Nikki Sixx (Douglas Booth), Tommy Lee (Machine Gun Kelly) and Mick Mars (Iwan Rheon) – from their early days as L.A rockers to the height of their fame as worldwide superstars.
REVIEW: For the longest time, I assumed no one would ever be able to turn the Mötley Crüe memoir, “The Dirt” (co-written by “The Game”’s Neil Strauss) into a legitimate film. If you read the book, this is NC-17 level stuff right from page one. It always amused me whenever a studio would sign-on to do it, as I knew there was no way it would ever make it to the silver screen without being toned way down.
Suffice to say, when I heard Netflix was finally making “The Dirt” into a movie, I figured the streamer, in this P.C-era, would make the guys a lot more cuddly than they came off in the book. To give the streamer major kudos, they went all-in on this one; giving director Jeff Tremaine (director of the JACKASS movies & BAD GRANDPA) enough leeway to make a movie that would have probably never been released intact by a major studio.
Right from the first scene, which recreates an iconic moment from the memoir involving a groupie’s “fluids”, it’s clear that nothing, and I mean nothing has been left out of “The Dirt”. All of the grossest moments have been left intact, even Ozzy Osborne drinking piss and snorting a line of ants like cocaine. It adds up to a raucous glam metal biopic that will no doubt please the group’s fans, and maybe (possibly) win them some new ones.
It helps that, just like in the book, some effort has been made to make this a warts-and-all biopic. Stories of the guys generally being assholes on the road, plowing their way through groupies and doing enough drugs to kill most mere mortals, make their way into the film. We get to see how Neil’s drug use had deadly consequences and almost ended his career, how marriages (including Lee’s to Heather Locklear) didn’t stop the guys from constant cheating and all-around bad behavior, and how even their friends (including a record company rep played by a low-key Pete Davidson) were treated like crap by the guys at the height of their fame.
Rather than make them come off poorly, the honesty has the reverse effect, in that you appreciate their candor and the fact that they’re not averse to making themselves look like total pricks as needed. The casting is pretty good here, with everyone except Machine Gun Kelly having to adopt American accents due to the actors being Brit/Aussie/Welsh. All of them pull it off fairly well, with the arguable star being Douglas Booth as Nikki Sixx, although as in the book the perspectives shift throughout the film as each hits their highs and lows.
As in life, the band members become victims of their own success, with cocaine playing a starring role here, although the trouble only really starts when Sixx develops a crippling addiction to heroin (it’s so harrowing a tale that Sixx spun it off into his own memoir, “The Heroin Diaries”). If the movie has a major problem, it’s that his addiction is short shifted, I suppose in order to keep this relatively fun and upbeat, although it’s hardly glamorized. All of the guys have their moment in the sun, with Daniel Webber a dead-ringer for Vince Neil when he was younger, and Machine Gun Kelly impressively personable as Tommy Lee. Of them all, Iwan Rheon as Mick Mars comes off as the most down-to-earth, being older than the rest of the fellas at the time and dealing with major health issues that keep him from indulging quite as much as his bandmates. David Costabile (from “Breaking Bad”) also has a nice role as the band’s iconic, two-fisted manager, Doc McGhee.
Overall, THE DIRT is a total blast, although if you’re looking for a gritty THE DOORS-style approach you’ve come to the wrong place. Mötley Crüe was always in it for a good time and that’s what this movie is too – a good time. That said, it’s also daring enough to shine a light of the dark side of excess without condemning them (I’m pretty sure most of us would be just as bad or worse with similar access to drugs and money). It’s a great biopic for the band and should have younger viewers heading to Spotify to rock out to their catalog.