Any controversy kicked off by the film will be unenlightening. The movie was bogged down in production for years, Sixx told Rolling Stone, because at least one studio boss objected to the opening scene: Lee giving oral sex to a woman—in the middle of a party—who then shoots a geyser from between her legs to the cheering of onlookers. The sequence ends up feeling less like a throwback to the ’80s free-for-all it depicts than to ’90s raunch-coms such as American Pie. More trollish than legitimately offensive, it’s not quite indicative of the problem here. A similarly outrageous turn later in the film gets at the deeper rot. At poolside with the newly minted stars of Mötley Crüe, the grande dame of heavy metal, Ozzy Osbourne, dispenses advice: Don’t overdo the drugs and sex on tour, boys, or else you’ll end up “fucking mad.” Presumably to illustrate his point, he snorts a line of live ants. Then he pees on the ground. Then he licks up his own pee. Sixx, inspired by his idol, pees on the ground too. Ozzy pushes him away to lick up the younger man’s urine before Sixx can do so himself. Yeesh. The depravity-chic of rock and roll can indeed work like a black hole, but Black Sabbath at least pioneered a kind of willful, satanic nihilism. By the time Ozzy’s style had been recycled by Mötley Crüe, any pretense of commentary was gone. “Certain of metal’s trappings (long hair, loud guitars, a kind of spurious defiance) had been appropriated, but this was not heavy metal, because it was not heavy: no doom, no drag,” wrote The Atlantic’s James Parker, reviewing a Crüe contemporary’s memoir. “Metal’s drama of cosmic exile was ditched in favor of a desperate, slurping hedonism.” Self-indulgence is the individual’s prerogative, but Crüe’s involved more than just the self and more than just indulgence. That others got hurt or destroyed by Crüe’s rampages is hinted at in The Dirt’s litany of the members’ girlfriends and wives who were cheated on and casually insulted. One friend, Hanoi Rocks’s drummer Razzle, died in the car Neil had been drunkenly driving. The bandmates committed betrayals of the lowest sort among one another too. At one point, Neil, fresh out of rehab, is offered what he believes to be a plate of cocaine, but that actually turns out to be heroin. The Dirt knows it’s working with dark stuff, but excuses it as part of the great adventure to rock bottom and back. By the end, with the reunited members performing Crüe’s final concert in 2015, the band’s survival is portrayed as a life-affirming triumph: the very point of the story. “I can’t say that I worried,” Tremaine told Rolling Stone about making this movie in the #MeToo era. “We are telling a true story that happened. You can interpret it however. I don’t think we changed the tone of the movie to fit the times or anything like that.”<doc-sep>Partying with Ozzy Osbourne, snorting cocaine off drum kits and having sex backstage with groupies mid-show. These are just a few of Motley Crue's wild antics depicted in their Netflix biopic "The Dirt" (streaming Friday), which charts the band's meteoric rise to fame in the 1980s. But was the rock-star life really as outrageous as it looks in the movie? "Even more so," says lead singer Vince Neil, 58. "We were young kids and crazy and wanted to live for that excess. I think they capture it in the film without going completely overboard on it." "Dirt" is based on Motley Crue's collective 2001 autobiography of the same name, and stars rapper Machine Gun Kelly as drummer Tommy Lee, Douglas Booth as bassist Nikki Sixx, Daniel Webber as Neil, and "Game of Thrones' " Iwan Rheon as guitarist Mick Mars. MTV Films bought rights to the book in 2006, but the movie lingered in development for more than a decade: changing production companies and directors, and losing original stars including Liam Hemsworth. Before "Jackass" director Jeff Tremaine came aboard andNetflix saved the project in 2017, "we were attached to some different companies that didn't necessarily see it the way we did," says Sixx, 60. "They were worried about ratings and fitting into the landscape, but we stood our ground. We wanted to be able to tell the story honestly from that era." More: 'My mouth is too honest, man': Machine Gun Kelly keeps it real as Motley Crue's Tommy Lee More: Nikki Sixx talks about having a baby at 60, post-vasectomy: 'I missed being a dad' But sharing their truth wasn't always easy. While the first half of "Dirt" is a booze-soaked, music-filled romp through their greatest hits including "Looks That Kill" and "Home Sweet Home," the two-hour movie takes a darker turn as the rockers' bad habits start to catch up with them. In December 1987, Sixx was declared dead for two minutes after a heroin overdose and went to rehab soon after with his bandmates. "I was doing a little over $1,000 a day in heroin, and then probably the same in cocaine and alcohol," Sixx says. "I was in a downward spiral and was eventually going to end up dead or bankrupt. And that was hard to watch in the film." Neil also had to relive his share of pain: The movie shows his 1984 drunk-driving accident that killed Hanoi Rocks drummer Nicholas "Razzle" Dingley and seriously injured two others. He spent 15 days in jail and received five years probation. "It was rough for everybody after that accident," Neil says. "I tried to stay sober for a few years, but it's tough when there's no support system around you. They were still doing coke and drinking and carrying on, and I just couldn't be a part of it." The movie reaches its dramatic climax with Neil's firing from Motley Crue in 1992, only for his bandmates to rally behind him in 1995 when his 4-year-old daughter, Skylar, died of cancer. (He rejoined the group in 1997.) The scenes of him and Skylar in the hospital "really brought back those feelings from back then," Neil says. "It's been a long time and those feelings are still there. I got emotional while I was watching it and it was just so sad." Both bandmates insist there have been no talks of another album from Motley Crue, who played their farewell tour in 2015. But they did reunite in the studio recently to record four new songs for the "Dirt" soundtrack, which felt just "like riding a bicycle," Sixx says. "It's been almost 40 years with these three guys," he says. "We know everything about each other. I've known Mick and Tommy and Vince longer than anybody on Earth. ... So there's a bond between us that is unbreakable. Even if we're fighting, it's unbreakable."<doc-sep>Motley Crüe and Netflix are reportedly being sued by a crew member who sustained severe injuries during the filming of The Dirt. The new biopic, which stars Iwan Rheon, Machine Gun Kelly, Douglas Booth, and Daniel Webber as the hell-raising band, arrived on Netflix last Friday (March 22) and is based on the group’s 2001 memoir of the same name. Following its release, a crew member has claimed that he was electrocuted by a power line while working on the set in March 2018. The New Orleans Advocate reports that Louis DiVincenti – who served as a rigging grip during production – was left with 50 per cent of his body covered by third-degree burns. DiVincenti said he was passing metal pipes down to other crew members, before one made contact with a nearby power line. He explained that an electrical current “arced through his body and blew out through his right foot.” With the accident taking place during a shoot at a New Orleans restaurant, DiVincenti said that he then spent seven weeks in the Louisiana city’s University Medical Center – where he was given a two per cent chance of survival. Despite surviving after multiple surgeries and skin grafts, DiVincenti’s right foot had to be amputated. Now, a lawsuit has been filed against Netflix and Motley Crüe, which claims they are liable for the accident due to a breach of health and safety precautions during production. “Netflix and the producers of the movie The Dirt, including band members Tommy Lee, Mick Mars, Vince Neil and Nikki Sixx, are liable for the production’s failure to address electrical hazards near the Munch Factory restaurant in the Lower Garden District,” it states. It’s reported that DiVincenti is seeking damages, which include $1.8 million in medical bills. NME has contacted Netflix for comment.<doc-sep>
When Mötley’s catalog was good, it was at the pinnacle of hard rock, slicing arena-rock bluster down to its essentials and adding just enough gutter-sourced grime to make every riff pack a punch. Too Fast for Love, the band's first album, shimmies at the vortex of glam, punk, power pop, and metal; Dr. Feelgood, their 1989 post-getting-clean comeback, pairs parade-balloon-sized versions of Mars’ riffs and Lee’s drumming with hooky anthems. The Dirt, however, lacks the sharp focus of those two Crüe pinnacles. It can’t seem to decide between being a smirking send-up of rock-star and rock-movie excess, or a love letter to the band’s collective youth. The impeccable recreations of Crüe live shows and MTV-beloved videos would suggest the latter route. As for the former, the moments that break the fourth wall are too few and far between, although they’re often satisfying: There’s a glorious sequence where Colson “Machine Gun Kelly” Baker takes the viewer on a first-person-perspective travelogue of a typical day in Tommy Lee’s life—complete with 5 p.m. wake-up call, unasked-for blow job, hotel room destruction, and wiry, speed-spiked adrenaline—that both revels in the vacuity of the band’s decadence and makes it feel kind of terrifying, until it forcibly stops. With the exception of scenes like this, the movie follows a familiar arc: Band of seeming misfits gets together; band succeeds against some (but not all) odds; band loses itself up its own collective asshole; tragedy strikes; rehab trip; rinse; shuffle those last three and repeat. It opens in the early 1970s, when Sixx—then using his birth name, Frank Feranna—leaves Seattle for Los Angeles; it ends in the ’90s, after Neil’s return to the fold but before Lee’s departure for rap-rock pastures. In between, there’s tons of sex, thousands of dollars’ worth of drugs, and too much infighting, all of which function as workplace perks and/or annoyances would in a more mundane on-the-job flick. Sex is viewed like sustenance that can also give the guys and their associates bragging rights; the women in the movie mostly exist as eye candy, to the point where Neil’s first two wives are collapsed into a single character. Lee’s later-in-life domestic violence toward Pamela Anderson, meanwhile, isn’t in the movie (its timeline doesn’t span that late), but it is foreshadowed by an incident where he punches a girlfriend who repeatedly called his mother a cunt. Ultimately, The Dirt resembles one of those re-recorded greatest-hits albums that the Crüe’s hard-rock compatriots released during their lean years: trying to recreate past glories, only to sound like a tribute band’s game. The first set piece in the Mötley House, featuring a woman whose Lee-coaxed orgasm very nearly soaks her fellow partygoers, feels like Tremaine nodding to his past as a co-creator of MTV's gross-out fest “Jackass.” (While the mise en scene might have been exaggerated, the woman in question was very real, and dubbed “Bullwinkle” while dating Lee.) The car accident that killed Razzle, drummer for Finnish glamsters Hanoi Rocks, brings to mind the crash in Hysteria: The Def Leppard Story, and downplays the searing effect it had on the hard rock world. And the band rehearsing in a studio that's festooned with a larger-than-life Pearl Jam poster brings to mind the scene in Warrant's “Behind the Music” episode, where late frontman Jani Lane recalled seeing a label-office poster of his band replaced by one touting the new album by Alice in Chains. A biopic is, of course, going to cut corners and refocus lights, particularly when band members are involved in its production. And The Dirt does have a few points that indicate just how high-stakes and bizarre the day-to-day lives of these four guys had become, from Ozzy Osbourne’s poolside ant-hoovering to Lee finding himself on the cover of the National Enquirer. But the broad, tone-shifting portrayal of Mötley Crüe’s first two-ish decades results in a movie as internally conflicted as a band meeting after a blown gig—only with way less fire.