A lot of my readers have been asking when I was going to do my write up on the long-awaited, much-anticipated release of the Motley Crue biopic, The Dirt. I’m not going to sit here and point out all of the inconsistencies and all of the “fact checking” of petty shit. I do have to say that the most ridiculous part of this whole movie was the live footage. Vince Neil NEVER sang every word to any song since the day he joined the band live.
I was actually embarrassingly excited to see this movie. I read The Dirt and let’s just say that it’s the greatest work of fiction since The Bible. Contradicting stories, contrived situations, and just a bunch of “we were the baddest band in the land” type of bullshit. The fact that both the book and the movie concentrated more on their antics than their creative output says a lot. Maybe that’s why there was only like 3-4 good songs (if that) per album up to the ’94 album with John Corabi. Ok, I’m rambling. Onto my thoughts about the movie.
For the most part, this movie is a Nikki Sixx story that features stories about the other guys. Douglas Booth, who didn’t really look like Sixx, actually pulled the roll-off decently. Nikki Sixx has always been this guy that I found intriguing. As big a dick as he was was back in the day, Sixx seems like a guy who pulled his shit together and eventually became a person he could live with and someone who appreciated all that came to him. With that being said, I also think that Mr. Sixx considers himself a poet; a true artist. It’s kind of hard to take someone that seriously who writes lyrics like, “…let’s make history in the elevator.”
Daniel Weber, who portrayed Vince Neil, is just as untalented as the real Vince Neil and honestly was way too ugly. I mean, wasn’t Vince pretty back in the day? I’m also pretty bummed that Bloated Vince Neil didn’t make an appearance. The real show stoppers were Machine Gun Kelly who played Tommy Lee and Iwan Rheon who played Mick Mars. Machine Gun Kelly was so good as Tommy Lee that at times I forgot that it wasn’t Tommy Lee.
Rheon did such a great Mick Mars that I totally find it believable that this is how he was. Let me just say that if Mick Mars really was that big of a fucking asshole, I want to be best friends with that guy. As a matter of fact, Mick Mars deserves his own movie. I can only hope that he will put out a book before he dies because I bet you anything that his story is far more interesting than this one by a long shot.
So back to the movie. There’s no mention at all that Sixx’s grandparents took his punk ass in and took care of him which I’m sure they would’ve been oh so happy with. As for John Corabi, Corabi gets a “smile” in the movie twice while the band looks outside the curtain looking out to what looks like a ¼ filled movie theater. Good going, Sixx. What a way to pay tribute to the guy who co-wrote and played on your best fucking album since Too Fast For Love. The Ozzy scene was hilarious because if anything, the guy looked like some dude who kinda looked like Ozzy dressed up as him for Halloween. I have no idea who the MTV VJ reporting on the song “Shout at the Devil” was supposed to be but they could’ve at least tried to find a Nina Blackwood lookalike.
The scene where Nikki Sixx is talking about how he fell in love with heroin is one of those examples where Sixx tries to put this romanticized poetic spin on something. It actually made me laugh after hearing this dialogue because it was so fucking corny. I do have to say though that Vince Neil saying that Theater of Pain was a shitty album except for two songs was pretty fucking hilarious. One more thing that I found somewhat odd is that Mick Mars consistently looked young in the movie and even towards the end the dude is walking upright like there was no problem.
To take 20+ years and cram it into an hour and 47 minutes isn’t an easy thing to do. Bohemian Rhapsody did a great job transitioning between eras even with its flaws but the Dirt just jumps from era to era with no transition, rhyme, or reason. They even managed to leave out/forget how much the reunion with Vince tanked for Generation Swine and the fact that Tommy Lee left the band to be a rapper, yo and that Randy Castillo (RIP) bailed them out when they needed a drummer on a tour that they could barely give away tickets for.
The Dirt touched on and covered the highs of Motley Crue’s success and even the highs of their lows making them seem like they weren’t really that bad when in fact, Motley Crue was in a pretty pathetic fucking stage for most of the ‘90s and into ‘00s. Of course, it’s somewhat of a glamorized bedtime story that is a mix between a Hallmark movie and one of those horrid VH1 bio-pics that they used to put out on bands like Stillwater and The Monkees. I personally would have loved to have seen this as a real documentary
The Dirt was worthy of watching because everyone likes a trainwreck. Is it horribly awesome or awesomely horrible? I will say that it has been really entertaining watching people say what an amazing movie this is and how extraordinary movie it is. These are also the same people that went to Motley Crue shows to the very end talking about how amazing they sounded.
At the end of it all, The Dirt is just what everyone expected it would be. An over-exaggerated caricature of a band that had/has very little substantial output but had great packaging. It’s like getting an awesomely wrapped present only to open it and it’s socks.
Motley Crue was literally smoke and mirrors. They found a way to become one of the biggest bands in the world with some of the most sub-par songs ever written. I fell for it as a kid but as an adult, I saw through the smoke and actually got smart as to what they were doing while millions of others just seemed content to keep their eyes on the smoke and mirrors. If that makes them happy and gives them a way to relieve their glory days of old, then so be it.
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