By Nick Perins
Student Reporter
Netflix is releasing a movie that has been in the works for over a decade because it is so gritty, raw and truthful that no other movie studio wanted to make it the way it was written.
“The Dirt” is about Mötley Crüe, the world’s most notorious band, it is a biopic that is coming out March 22. It is based on the raunchy, tell all memoir, which was written by all four band members in 2001, also called “The Dirt.”
This movie shows a raw, truthful look into the lives of the four outcasts that made up the band, and their excess of sex, drugs and alcohol consumption, as they experienced their rise, fall and rise again in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
In this movie, Colson Baker, better known as rapper Machine Gun Kelly, plays the role of Tommy Lee, the drummer of the band; Douglas Booth plays the bassist, Nikki Sixx; Iwan Rheon plays the guitarist, Mick Mars; and Daniel Webber plays the singer, Vince Neil.
Just from the trailer, it shows unique shots of live performances like Lee’s drum set going out over the crowd and rotating.
It shows some of the wild stuff that they did: like a member of the band diving out into the crowd, Sixx slamming his bass into someone during a show, the band lighting a hotel room on fire and also throwing a television out of a hotel window onto a car, crushing the roof.
The trailer also shows that with all of the fun that the band had partying, which comes with being famous and being a rock star, there are also downsides to all of it.
It shows Neil getting into a car wreck where he was charged with DUI and vehicular manslaughter; it show Sixx overdosing on heroin and being brought back to life in the back of an ambulance; it shows Lee’s marriage to actress Heather Locklear falling apart and it shows Mars’s struggle with his bone disease, Ankylosing Spondylitis.
This movie has been in the making for more than 14 years and has been passed around to a couple of different movie studios. According to an interview that Sixx gave to the build Series, it was very important to the band that the movie not get sanitized any, which was what the movie studios wanted to do.
Then, Netflix purchased the rights to the movie and gave them the OK to make the same exact movie that the book was.
This was important for the band because it shows their individual stories and how they came together with a gang like mentality and got famous and then all ended up at these very low points in their lives, before they came back together and straightened their lifestyles out.
Sixx described it as more of a cautionary tale because it is so truthful and transparent.
If stuff was left out of the stories, it wouldn’t be truthful and would be like a lot of other biopics that come out and show versions of the truth and have some stuff toned down, for better ratings and theatrical purposes.
The band has always been very truthful and transparent about their lifestyles and what they have been going through.
“I think everything was really spot on, which is frightening,” Lee said in an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine. “I still can’t believe it came out that well.”