The Dirt

Adapted from Mötley Crüe's collective 2001 autobiography. The most interesting thing about it is not what is on screen but how long it took to get there. Paramount and MTV Films bought the rights in 2006 with Larry Charles attached, and the project sat in development for more than a decade. In 2008 Nikki Sixx said it plainly: they needed to find the right partner and this was not it. Jeff Tremaine signed on in 2013, Netflix took worldwide rights in 2017, and only then did it move. Shooting started in New Orleans in February 2018 on a 23.1 million dollar budget, with Douglas Booth, Colson Baker, Daniel Webber and Iwan Rheon as the band. Reviews were rough. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 38 percent, and the consensus is that the film celebrates the debauchery while doing it with a dispiriting lack of substance. Critics returned again and again to how lightly it passes over the band's treatment of women and the death it caused. Who it is for: fans of the band and anyone curious about the eighties metal scene. Who it is not for: viewers expecting accountability. The film declines to judge its subjects, deliberately.