The True Story of Mötley Crüe
The glam-metal band’s riotous 2001 memoir turns into a Netflix original that doesn’t pull any punches
How the metal band’s riotous memoir turned into a wild Netflix original.
It’s a sunny spring day in New Orleans, and three men who look like the Sunset Strip coughed them up in 1985 are on a smoke break outside the Saenger Theatre. They are there to portray Mötley Crüe in Netflix’s wild
new biopic, The Dirt. Inside, fake roadies are setting up Marshall stacks onstage.
The resemblance to the band’s Theatre of Pain tour is uncanny, but there are signs that this is a different Crüe. Douglas Booth, who plays bassist Nikki Sixx, mentions that he found a cockroach in his hotel room last night and guided it to safety using a cup. “He should have called me in with my hairspray and a lighter,” the real Sixx says later with a laugh. “Next thing you know, though, there’d be marches outside the premiere from PETA for killing cockroaches.”
When Booth and the other actors are in front of the camera, they don’t hesitate to go all the way in channeling one of rock’s most shamelessly hedonistic bands. With its raunchy, over-the-top tone — the film starts with a graphic scene of Tommy Lee, played by Colson Baker (a.k.a. rapper Machine Gun Kelly), performing oral sex on a groupie — The Dirt is the anti- Bohemian Rhapsody.
Lee says he loved The Dirt, which is based on the band’s bestselling 2001 memoir of the same name, when he saw it. “It was fucking awesome, ’cause it was so fucking real,” says the drummer. “That’s not me now, but that shit was me then every damn day.”
The band, which co-produced the film and wrote new songs for the soundtrack, was committed to showing the uglier side of its story. We see the 1984 incident in which singer Vince Neil killed a man while driving under the influence, Sixx’s near-death heroin overdose, Lee punching his fiancee and more unsavory episodes. “The Mötley Crüe way was to be completely transparent,” Sixx says. “Just putting it out there is part of our charm, if there is such a thing.”
Baker, who’s idolized
Lee since he was 13, was initially nervous about how Crüe’s womanizing might be received in the #MeToo era, so he showed the script to a female Birdbox co-star. “The first scene is so ‘fuck you’ to the whole climate right now, so I asked her if she would flip out at the first page,” the actor says. “She thought it was cool that everything was consensual and that there was a fun aspect for both parties — at least what’s in the movie.”
Sixx, typically, puts it differently. “Let’s face it, bands are pretty fucking boring in 2019,” he says. “So maybe this could be a little inspiration for somebody.”