This year is all about musical biopics it seems. This latest one, The Dirt, comes from Netflix and portrays the rise to fame of American glam metal band, Mötley Crüe. Honestly, I've never been a huge fan of Mötley Crüe. I don't mind some of the music, and I've seen them live, but I'm by no means a hardcore fan.
The biopic stars Douglas Booth, Iwan Rheon, Machine Gun Kelly, and Daniel Webber in the respective roles of Nikki Sixx, Mick Mars, Tommy Lee, and Vince Neil, and while their actual physical appearances aren't entirely in line with how the young rockers looked at that age, what the film does capture perfectly is the essence of what life was like for the 80's glam rock band. It's one of the things that The Dirt certainly doesn't shy away from; the amount of sex and drugs that went on. Expect to see a lot of nudity and sex, as well as a lot of drug use and alcohol abuse.
It also is one of the weaknesses of the film too, as the actual music gets put on the backburner. While one would expect The Dirt to focus on how Mötley Crüe came to be, it instead skips past a lot of the formation and practising and instead jumps straight into trying to shock the audience with the amount of sex, drugs, and violence they can throw at the screen. Effectively removing anything that would create chemistry between the four band members, and make us really care about them.
The direction of the film is perhaps the most confusing part of it. You can tell it was directed by Jeff Tremaine because it feels like we are watching an episode of Jackass. Stunt after stunt, prank after prank, the biopic spends more time fishing for reaction shots from extras than it does try to develop its main characters. It flits from event to event like a highlight reel and doesn't really slow down enough to allow the viewer to truly dwell on the repercussions of anything, because consequences are clearly not important until the latter half of the film. (I should also note that I haven't read the book that this was all based on, so who know, maybe the book is the same?)
The rear end of The Dirt is where it starts to shine more. As addictions are taking their toll, we finally get to see their behaviour resulting in negative consequences, and the film finally becomes more than a visual reminder of how many women they have boinked. But again, it still skirts through everything so fast, that you soon forget the previous events and move on.
Overall though, it was a fun biopic. Doing some research you can easily tell that events have been juggled around to try and add more emotional impact at time and to add more drama, and I can see how that would be rather confusing for those die-hard fans who know everything about the timeline of the band (there are certainly enough official and unofficial biographies going around).
But this film doesn't seem to be made for the die-hard fans. This is made with mainstream appeal. It's light, energetic, and skims over any issues in a high-octane collection of boobs, alcohol and heroin. With such a minimal focus on the actual music, and some mediocre performance pieces (with very bad lipsyncing at times from Daniel Webber) this is just a period piece Jackass or American Pie. It doesn't really get the band chemistry right and plays down a lot of their rebellious nature to create an empty shell of a biopic.