For those who haven’t had the pleasure, The Dirt was the seminal (though perhaps the 'i' should be an 'e') book about Eighties glam rockers Mötley Crüe’s rise to superstardom, a celebrated example of the oral history form (yes yes), in which band members bassist Nikki Sixx, singer Vince Neil, drummer Tommy Lee and guitarist Mick Mars recounted their life experiences – The drugs! The sex! The accidentally killing of Razzle from Hanoi Rocks! – to Rolling Stone writer Neil Strauss. So legendary is it, in fact, that it has been turned into a movie by Netflix, which launches tonight. The only problem with this version of The Dirt, which is also, perversely, its greatest moral failing, is that it is, well… so very clean.
The book version of The Dirt came out in 2001, and was a publishing hit that made the New York Times bestseller list. The anecdotes in it have become stuff of rock 'n' roll lore, like the one about the time Ozzy Osbourne snorted ants and then licked up Nikki Sixx’s pee, or about that other time Sixx was clinically dead from a heroin overdose. Japes! Strauss’s portrayal of this gargantuan clash of egos has its moments of glorious Spinal Tap stupidity: how the band used to mask the smell of other girls by sticking their penises into “an egg burrito from Noggles”, or how they emblazoned the tail of their black private jet black with a giant cock and balls, or how they arrived on stage by a contraption that shot them into the air like “four giant Pop-Tarts”, or how Tommy once tried to sleep with a mentally unwell homeless girl and ended up stealing her clothes and sending her back onto the streets in tears after which she was never seen again. Wait. Wha…?
The problem with The Dirt – the book – is that it has aged about as well as Nikki Sixx/Tommy Lee/Vince Neil (Mick Mars looks much the same). As much as there are rip-roaring stories about eating escargots with Quaalude chasers and setting themselves on fire, there are stories that reveal deep-seated misogyny that is frankly breath-taking. And really, was it ever OK? Nikki admits his view of women was as of "pests who were sometimes useful as alternatives to masturbation"; Vince reportedly once got arrested for hitting a girl who didn’t like his outfit; Nikki admits he had "newfound respect" for Tommy after he watched him receive a blow job from his girlfriend in a jacuzzi full of other guys, and then "ordered [her] to work her way around the tub, blowing everyone", because "when he was done, he shared".
And what about the "thin, tan, huge-breasted girl" whom Nikki had sex with in a cupboard, only to allow Tommy to swap in for him without her knowing? An incident which Nikki recounted by contemplating that he had "pretty much" raped her. What the hell do you do with that?
According to the Netflix version it seems, not much. Strangely, that episode doesn’t make it into the film version of The Dirt, which is directed by Jeff Tremaine (Jackass), stars pretty Englishman Douglas Booth as Nikki Sixx, rapper Machine Gun Kelly as Tommy Lee, Australian actor Daniel Webber as Vince Neil and Game of Thrones’ Iwan Rheon – who blows everyone else off screen (in the puffy film review sense, not the Tommy Lee girlfriend in a jacuzzi sense) – as Mick Mars. Its co-producers are – you guessed it! – Mötley Crüe. Perhaps they regret their behaviour; perhaps they exaggerated it in the first place; perhaps they can’t even remember (Sixx has recently told Rolling Stone that he could no longer recall the cupboard incident). Whatever their reasons, the film is soft-soaping on a colossal scale.
The film’s Mötley Crüe aren’t the four monstrous, destructive narcissists of the book but rather a gang of young guys who got in too deep too fast. As the film reminds us, Nikki came from a broken home, Mick has an degenerative illness, Vince lost a daughter (the book’s one unconditionally harrowing and tragic episode), and Tommy was just a romantic who loved too much. The one time he’s shown hitting a girlfriend – let’s not forget he later spent time in prison for kicking his then-wife Pamela Anderson – the drama goes to great lengths to show the extent to which he was provoked.
When the band reunites at the end of the film (the book goes on much further into their divorces, addictions, and increasingly delusional egos) we’re fully expected to join them in a leather-cuffed air punch. But no doing. The Dirt is a book from a bygone era and this in an adaptation that, in this day and age, shouldn’t have happened. If they’d made the dirty version it would have been morally bankrupt, but this cleaned-up version, for what it celebrates, and what it leaves out, is arguably even worse.
The Dirt launches today on Netflix
Miranda Collinge is the Deputy Editor of Esquire, overseeing editorial commissioning for the brand. With a background in arts and entertainment journalism, she also writes widely herself, on topics ranging from Instagram fish to psychedelic supper clubs, and has written numerous cover profiles for the magazine including Cillian Murphy, Rami Malek and Tom Hardy.
