The Dirt (2019)

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Flack
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The Dirt (2019)

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My cassette of Motley Crue's first album, Too Fast For Love, has a Sound Warehouse sticker on the back that says "Hot Pick - 1982." I didn't buy it the day it came out, but I owned it before they released their second album, Shout at the Devil. I discovered the band through my next door neighbor's guitar-playing older brother. I still own Shout at the Devil on vinyl, although I owned it on cassette, too. I've purchased original copies of every single Motley Crue album (and some of them multiple times, on multiple formats) and seen them perform live twice -- once back in 1990 during my junior year of high school, and once in 2015 during their farewell tour. In 8th grade, I ditched my space-themed Trapper Keeper for a plain three-ring binder with a clear pouch on the outside that allowed you to insert your own artwork; I put a picture of Vince Neil and Nikki Sixx in mine. I used to have a small "Theater of Pain" mirror hanging on my wall that I won at the state fair by throwing darts at under-inflated balloons. Motley Crue was a big part of my childhood, and one of my favorite bands.

But before I can talk about 2019's The Dirt, the new Netflix biopic based on the band's career, I have to talk briefly about the 2001 book that the movie was based on. Following two not-so-great albums that even fans of the band would struggle to name songs from (1997's Generation Swine and 2000's New Tattoo), the book version of The Dirt felt a lot like the band's swan song. By then, lead singer Vince Neil had already quit the band, launched a solo career consisting of multiple albums and tours, and returned. When Vince returned, it was drummer Tommy Lee's turn to depart the Crue and form his rap/rock project, Methods of Mayhem. (And also film a spectacular tape with Pamela Anderson.) Back in 2001 when the book was written, it felt a lot like Motley Crue was a done deal. The book left no holds barred and dished out everything. I mean, everything.

Rumors of a film based on the book have been swirling ever since, but the way I saw it, there were two major hurdles. The first was, the book contains so much sex, drugs, and rock and roll that it's barely filmable. Few people partied as hard as Motley Crue back in their heyday, and even fewer lived through it to tell their tales. I mean, in the book, Nikki Sixx brags that he had a giant swimming pool installed in the shape of a vagina. How do you film that in the #MeToo era? The second hurdle was... Motley Crue didn't end after the book came out. In fact, they toured for another 15 years. How do you film a band's swan song when the swans won't stop swimming?

Motley Crue officially retired from touring in 2015, and Jeff (Jackass) Tremaine has never felt the need to be politically correct. With those two hurdles cleared, that brings us to Netflix's 2019 The Dirt.

Anyone who has ever watched a single band biopic should know the plot arc before ever starting the film. The band will form, they'll get famous, their own vices will be their downfall, the band will almost break up, and at the end they'll come back together to kick ass into the sunset. So is the case here. Four high school dropouts dabble in other bands before bassist Nikki Sixx begins to piece together what will ultimately become Motley Crue. Each of the four band members has their own demons to escape and reasons for wanting to make it. The funny thing is, the bar Motley Crue set to define "making it" was pretty low. A couple of cases of beer and a bunch of topless girls, and the guys in the band were as happy as they could be.

With each album and tour, the band got more money and less happy. While touring in support of their third album, Theater of Pain, Vince Neil was involved in a head-on collision while driving drunk and killed his passenger. (Neil served 30 days in prison and paid around $2.5 million plus 200 hours of community service). On the next tour, Nikki Sixx overdosed on heroin and was declared legally dead before paramedics injected needles full of adrenaline into his heart ("Kickstart My Heart"). During his hiatus from the band, Neil's 4YO daughter Skyler got stomach cancer and died. Tommy Lee got caught dating a porn start by the tabloids, causing then wife Heather Locklear to divorce him. Mick Mars was diagnosed with a bone disease that was (and is) fusing his bones together.

Buuuuut... spoiler alert! By the end of the film, everybody is clean, the band is back together, and as the fearsome foursome take the stage, we see the words "and the band continued to tour for another 20 years." A happy ending!

Except of course, that's not what really happened. In the film, Sixx, Mars, and Lee confront Vince at a bar and convince him to rejoin in the band. In real life, lawyers -- a whole lot of lawyers -- were involved. The band was never the same since. After the final tour, Nikki Sixx had this to say about his bandmates: "We don't hang out now… We go on stage… like motherfuckers. But we don't hang out. We don't go to dinner, we don't go to each other's houses for Christmas. We're not enemies, but we're not friends… I'll probably never see them, except in passing." In the same article, drummer Tommy Lee noted that he couldn't find his bandmates after the final show, and that the next day, Nikki Sixx unfollowed him on Twitter.

Taking an almost 40 year career, condensing it into 400 pages, and compressing that into 108 minutes, you can imagine a lot of things got cut and lost. Neither Pamela Anderson nor Vanity (who Nikki Sixx married) are mentioned at all. John Corabi, the singer that replaced Vince Neil for five years, is in the film for ten seconds. But what's 100x more annoying are all the little details that were changed for apparently no reason. If you're not a fan of the band, you'll never know the difference. For example, every Crue fan knows Neil was driving a vintage Ford Pantera (how could you forget the name?) when he crashed and killed his passenger. In the movie, it's a convertible 'Vette. Also, it's been well established that when Nikki Sixx overdosed on heroin, he was partying with his girlfriend, Slash, G'NR drummer Steven Adler, Ratt's Robbin Crosby, and others. In the movie, it's just some weird dealer that shoots him up. Also in the book, Sixx claims to have had an out of body experience, and also went to the hospital. Not in the movie.

All four members of Motley Crue were executive producers on the film, and co-authored the book it was based on. So when you see things like the table at the club the guys always sit at that has a blonde underneath that gives blowjobs to anyone who sits there (it happens three times in the movie), it's not like it's based on a fact some seedy music journalist dug up somewhere; the guys in the band want you to know that happened. They thought it was great then, and they think it's important enough to include in the movie. The closest the guys come to an apology is in the literal last minute of the film, in which Mars says "I don't know how we're not dead or in jail. We shit on a lot of people and did things that we regret every day. But somehow, we're still here, in it together." It's slightly more eloquent than Tommy's parting words: "All I can say is, we fucking made it, dude."

The Dirt, like Bohemian Rhapsody, is okay if you want the gist of the band's story.
"I failed a savings throw and now I am back."