The Dirt: my favorite bad movie

by Carsten Wallace-Bailey

Mötley Crüe, a glam rock, “hair metal” band, formed in 1981, are who I would consider the quintessential 80’s rock band, and themselves may be the quintessential guilty pleasure. A group of 4 spandex and leopard print clad men who did enough drugs to kill every conservative Christian D.A.R.E. supporter in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area, and had enough unprotected sex with enough women to repopulate tenfold. Did these men make good enough music to warrant that? Probably not, but that’s never been the draw of Mötley Crüe to me. The draw is the absurdity of substance abuse that these men put their bodies through. Stories of heroin overdoses, group orgies, and the human manifesto of sex, drugs, and rock and roll is what intrigues me about them. Tommy Lee, Nikki Sixx, Mick Mars, and Vince Neil have become gods of the immoral and indulgent, and its fascinating to hear the stories of what they got up to and how it affected them. Stories that words almost can’t do justice. Lucky for me, Netflix made a documentary on the lives of Mötley Crüe, based on their biography. Sounds awesome! Its going to be so well made and well produced and they’re going to perfectly capture the nuance and psychological understandings of addiction as well as creatively showing the stories of these famed Drug ‘n Sex gods justice, right?

(EXTREMELY LOUD BUZZER)

Directed by Jeff Tremaine, The Dirt (2019) is, like I said, a biopic about the band Mötley Crüe. I don’t need to describe all of the film’s content, or the story, or accuracy of the real-life accounts, but from the research that I’ve done, it seems pretty close to the truth! That’s a win that this movie has, and pretty much the only one it gets. It is pretty realistic in showing the bands antics, yes, but god I don’t know if I could call it realistic, given how fucking terrible some of the acting is.

I will say, I do enjoy Douglas Booth and Iwan Rheon’s performances as Nikki Sixx and Mick Mars, respectively, but that’s pretty much it in terms of passible acting in this film. I don’t know who was in charge of casting for this movie, but whoever decided to cast Colson Baker, better known as fucking Machine Gun Kelly, as a lead role in literally any major motion picture needs to be taken out back and told to look at the rabbit. Machine Gun Kelly cannot rap, he cannot produce good music, he cannot play the guitar in a more complicated way than a 12-year-old that heard a Blink-182 song for the first time, and he definitely cannot act. He sure as hell cannot put together a compelling enough performance worthy of playing such a notable cultural icon as Tommy Lee. God he is so bad. Spoiler warning for a biopic about events that happened in real life, the scene where Pamela Anderson divorces him is maybe the worst acting job I’ve seen in my life. Seeing Machine Gun Kelly in his gross early 90’s Mötley Crüe costume is actively hilarious, and draws me out of any realism that this movie tries to display. It also has Pete Davidson in it, playing a character that Pete Davidson doesn’t need to play. Minus points.

Bad acting aside, the real pitfall of this movie is what I like to call the Wolf of Wall Street effect, where a movie glorifies drugs, sex, and general debauchery so much for such a crucial part of the plot, and essentially frames it as good things that happen to the good guys that never have repercussions. Which is such a weird phenomenon, given that a man dying in a drunk driving accident and a famous heroin overdose are such pivotal points in this movies story. Razzle, drummer of fellow hair metal band Hanoi Rocks, gets killed in an accident where Mötley Crüe frontman Vince Neil was driving drunk. Was it sad? Yeah. Did they show how beat up Vince was about it? Yeah (though Daniel Webber looked more beat up trying to portray any emotion in his character than Vince the character did). Did it mean shit? Nope! I know that’s what happened in real life, Nikki and Tommy still did a fuck ton of drugs while Vince attempted to remain sober, but its entirely glorified in the movie. Yeah, Machine Gun Kelly’s painful acting doesn’t really do much to convince us how shitty Tommy felt while abusing drugs, but even so, it doesn’t show the real pitfalls.

The movie does do a pretty good job revolving around Nikki Sixx and his heroin problem, however. Maybe Douglas Booth is just a good actor amongst his peers in this film, but he plays a convincing addict, and it isn’t glorified. He seems to be the only one that has a good character arc, and the back-in-the-saddle-again story of the band post Nikki’s heroin overdose is certainly fun, but again, really just glorifies the debauchery they were a part of, without really showing the consequence of anything aside from heroin. But you know what, that’s the point of the movie.

I’m not watching a movie about fucking Mötley Crüe for a good story, for a nuanced, intelligent take on the psychology of addiction or the consequences fame, I’m watching it because its fun. I want to see bad actors snort cocaine off of some poor extra, or see people get into street fights, or recreations of shitty 80’s glam outfits. I enjoy the absurdity of it. This is not a Wolf of Wall Street-esque “I wanna do drugs and degrade women!” movie, it’s a “holy shit those guys were crazy, I’ll go listen to some better music now haha” movie.

It's fun, and that’s all it needs to be taken as. I like seeing the absurdity, I like seeing the story of musicians played out sort of faithfully, I like seeing world stadium rock tours portrayed sort-of realistically, and I’ll admit it, I like seeing boobs. There are a lot of boobs in this movie, its essentially porn at points. It makes it very awkward to watch on an airplane, which I have done several times. I don’t know why this has become my go-to plane movie, but it has. Maybe it’s just the idea of turning my brain off and not having to digest something that will challenge my mind. And you know what, I’m OK with that.

The more I’ve been able to understand and critically analyze media (ew), the more cognitive dissonance I feel watching movies like this. They are so bad, and they fall into every problem I know to criticize, but goddammit I love watching it and its fun. Sue me, revoke my FMS major, I like to shit on bad movies, and I can have fun watching them too. That’s what a guilty pleasure is.