Netflix Digs Down in the Gutter with The Dirt
I was born in 1987, right in the midst of hair metal, leather pants and rock n’ roll excess. Yet, Motley Crue is a cornerstone of party anthems. We all know the songs and we all know the stories. Credit then to Netflix for giving us a glimpse at the booze-fueled carnage with The Dirt.
Granted, the view is seldom pretty and the fun vacillates between paper-thin and by-the-numbers. The fun, by the way, is balls-out hedonism that rarely stops to take a drag off a Marlboro. In many ways, it’s the only kind of biopic that LA’s once-baddest of the bad deserve. The voiceovers and occasional fourth wall breaks don’t enhance the viewing experience and you almost wish they had stuck to letting the leads (Douglas Booth, Machine Gun Kelly, Daniel Webber and Iwan Rheon) play the whole thing straight without having to inform the audience that- yes – certain liberties were taken to ensure that three-plus decades of the worst possible behavior could be watered-down into 108 brainless minutes.
We’re given an all-access traipse through the band’s travails, all the way from try-outs in an LA slum to their first record deal courtesy of SNL’s Pete Davidson looking like Steve from Blue’s Clues coming off an epic bender, to the inevitable and very public low points the band suffered at the hands of drugs, alcohol and a turnstile of terrible choices.
Between the cheating, doping, hotel room fires and constant, shameless back-stabbing brought to life from the band’s tell-all of the same name, it’s a monumental task for the average person to conjure up any sympathy for the hair metal demons, even as they venture to and from rock bottom. This is truly a gauntlet of stupid games that earn Neil and co. the stupidest of prizes.
There are glimpses- blips, really- of humanity reaching up from the deluge. Daniel Webber’s Vince Neil has several moments, most notably when dealing with the death of the singer’s young daughter, where there’s some real heart that belies the platinum mane and endless x-rated groupie love. Booth’s Nikki Sixx, whose path through life reads like a back-alley LA Oliver Twist, is probably the closest thing the main cast has to a lead and he does well with most of the material, though Rheon, of Game of Thrones fame is the most fun to watch as he deadpan’s his way through the movie as if he knows just how ridiculous the whole ride is.
In fact, the movie’s best performance comes in a brief, yet sinister, turn from Tony Cavalero as Ozzie Osbourne being appropriately vile in front of hotel guests at a pool.
As far as music biopics go, there are varying degrees of living color to choose from. If anyone is shopping around for something with the grit and gravity of maestro snapshots like Ray or Walk the Line, keep looking. The Dirt hails from the same side of the tracks as like Mark Wahlberg’s blown-out Rock Star and only further validates the hilarity mirroring real life in the peerless This is Spinal Tap!.
Still, there’s always a market demand for something that lets you power down your brain and drink in what it was like to be young, rich and be beholden to nothing but bar chords and the purgatory of hangovers in perpetuity. If you like your music loud and fiendishly proud, get in here and get weird.