Thoughts on The Dirt

Over the weekend I had an opportunity to watch the Netflix original movie based on the book written by members of Mötley Crüe.  My wife has been excited about this movie for awhile now.  I was mostly ambivalent but maybe slightly morbidly curious.  I am not the biggest Mötley Crüe fan in the world, though I will freely admit that they have some damn good songs, particularly "Dr. Feelgood" and some of their earlier material.

The movie covered most of the band's history, from their inception up to fairly recent times.  The movie did not skimp on the debauchery that the band became notorious for.  There was a lot of nudity and a lot of drugs in the movie.  No reasonable story could be told about this band while sticking to a PG rating.  It touched on a number of important events in the band's history, such as the car accident in which Vince Neil was charged with motor vehicle homicide in the death of Razzle of Hanoi Rocks, the descent into addiction of Nikki Sixx which almost resulted in his death, the death of Vince Neil's daughter to cancer, and the failed marriage of Tommy Lee to Heather Locklear (though not Pamela Anderson oddly).  The movie did tend to gloss over a lot of the latter years in the band's career, briefly showing the addition of John Corabi, but it did not mention Neil's solo career at all.  It also did not discuss the years the band members were not even on speaking terms.  There was some implication that it had been awhile, but not specified how long.

The aspect I liked the most about the movie was the element of narration, particularly where the narrator turned out to be somewhat unreliable.  At times, when one of the members was telling a story, one of the other band members would interrupt and explain that this was not how things really happened.  The best example was when Nikki was telling the story about how they met their first manager and Mick interrupted explaining the story was all wrong and there was an additional individual associated with the band that had been written out of the movie.

The casting was somewhat interesting.  The actors playing Sixx and Neil were not familiar to me, but Machine Gun Kelley played Tommy Lee and Iwan Rheon (Ramsay Bolton from Game of Thrones) was Mick Mars.  In an unusual switch from his normal roles, Rheon did not spend every moment on screen talking.

I actually did find myself enjoying the movie much more than I thought I would.  It was by no means perfect, but the actors had decent charisma and it was entertaining.  It dragged a bit in the second half, but it never really became tedious.  After the huge success of Straight Outta Compton, I think the idea was to try to strike big with another movie about a band.  I doubt this will ever come anywhere close to the success of Compton, nor should it for many reasons, but it was entertaining enough.  Now, an Ozzy Osbourne movie could be very good...