Netflix dishes Crue’s Dirt in all its Motley details
Debuting in New Zealand tomorrow, a biopic of the outrageous Californian rockers Motley Crue reflects the craziness of the time. James Hall reports.
‘Ilike dangerous,’’ says Tommy Lee. ‘‘But everybody’s so f...ing safe now, so afraid to be rock stars.’’ Lee, the 56-year-old drummer of outrageous Californian rockers Motley Crue, has little time for the tepid modern bands that have followed in their wake.
They are, he says, pathetically risk-averse, too scared to have fun. But then again, as an eyepopping new film makes clear, it would take quite a lot to be as rock’n’roll as Lee.
This week sees the release of The Dirt, a Netflix adaptation of Motley Crue’s sleazy, best-selling 2001 autobiography, subtitled Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band.
More than a decade in the making, the film charts their rise from Californian wannabes to the tattooed kings of the heavy metal scene, and stars The Riot Club’s Douglas Booth as bassist Nikki Sixx and Iwan Rheon from Game of Thrones as lead guitarist Mick Mars.
Achieving record sales of more than 100 million, Motley Crue became the big-haired poster boys for an obnoxious amalgam of glam and punk rock. Dressed in spandex, high heels and makeup, they fetishised a life of pure hedonism. Indeed, so uncompromising are the accounts of partying, sex and drug abuse in the book of The Dirt that many had assumed it to be unfilmable. Until now.
‘‘Netflix have steel balls,’’ says Sixx, before explaining that a female executive at another film company once vowed that the movie would only be made over her dead body.
The Dirt’s unstinting fidelity to the book – it opens with a jaw-dropping scene in which Lee’s girlfriend performs an astonishingly explicit party trick – is already a point of pride for Lee, who is played on screen to great gangly effect by rapper and actor Machine Gun Kelly. ‘‘Oh boy,’’ Lee chuckles, ‘‘this might be the first time people actually enjoy the movie more than the book.’’
Directed by Jackass veteran Jeff Tremaine, The Dirt arrives at a time when the rock biopic is riding high. The Oscar-winning Queen film Bohemian Rhapsody is edging towards a billion dollars at the global box office and an Elton John film, Rocketman, is set for release in May.
Yet, says Lee, there have been ‘‘so many lame rock’n’roll movies’’ over the years. Although he enjoyed Bohemian Rhapsody, he was ‘‘bummed out’’ that it swept Freddie Mercury’s homosexuality ‘‘under the rug’’ and wishes ‘‘they would have got into that some more and really let people into how weird s... got’’.
Things certainly got weird in Motley Crue. The Dirt depicts Sixx’s toxic relationship with his parents and the later, rampant heroin abuse that led, in December 1987, to cardiac arrest – and him being declared clinically dead.
He was only revived after paramedics injected adrenalin directly into his heart. (The band wrote one of their biggest hits, Kickstart My Heart, about the incident. Every cloud. . .)
Today, Sixx, who turned 60 in December, is sober. He is more intense in his delivery than Lee and prone to rehab-speak, as one might expect of a man whose addiction was so deep-set that the only thing he chose to rescue from his Los Angeles
‘‘We didn’t treat anybody or anything with respect. It’s just the way it was. We grew up with the Sex Pistols, the Buzzcocks and Black Sabbath. Am I supposed to be in the Backstreet Boys now?’’ Nikki Sixx