How Accurate is Netflix's The Dirt?

Answer 1

Debauchery, umlauts, and girls, girls, girls: Netflix's Mötley Crüe biopic The Dirt delivers on the 1980's hair metal mythmaking. But how much of it is, you know, true?

Some elements of the film are patently fictional, betraying an inventiveness that the movie wears on its sleeve. In one scene, Crüe manager Doc McGhee (played by David Costabile) punches a stray partygoer by way of introduction. Guitarist Mick Mars (portrayed by Iwan Rheon) turns to the cameras to deliver a fourth-wall-melting admission: "This didn't actually happen," the character says. "Doc never came to this filthy s***hole."

But emotionally? As a depiction of the 1980's Sunset Strip glam scene? The movie captures the spirit of the era at least as well as the book on which it was based, say some of the band's real-life members.

"There's comedy, there's tragedy, and it's a f*cking roller coaster emotionally," Tommy Lee, Crüe drummer and high-profile ex-husband, told Rolling Stone of the film. "There's bummer stuff, some fun, stupid sh*t, and it's the whole gamut of what the hell we went through then."

That's a fair endorsement of the film's broad-strokes accuracy. Director Jeff Tremaine goes one further, describing the IRL band's viewing of the film as an experience of profound recognition.

"I was sitting right behind Tommy [Lee] and Nikki [Sixx] when they were watching it for the first time," Tremaine told Rolling Stone. "And Tommy was getting so psyched when he'd see things like the Sunset Boulevard sign and all the fun stuff at the beginning. He just keep going, 'That's exactly f*cking right.' And then when it starts getting heavy, they both got kind of quiet, and I could hear them become just really captivated and reminiscing."

Nikki Sixx, Crüe bassist and now-sober Survivor of a (momentarily) fatal overdose, said that the band was given veto power over the script before filming.

"We okay'd everything because we thought it was telling our story," he told Rolling Stone. "We felt it needed to be truthful."

So it sounds like the film was accurate enough for the men it depicted. But as another Rolling Stone piece, "Fact-Checking Mötley Crüe's Netflix Movie 'The Dirt,'" points out, the script made certain omissions and changes from true history in order to craft a coherent narrative.

For instance, the real-life Crüe had a lead singer, O'Dean Peterson, before Vince Neil took over. That detail is left out of the film. A few meetings and important career moments were shifted in time or moved to different locations. Oh, and then there was Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson's marriage, which might be the most memorable thing about Crüe members in the 1990s--this marriage does not get a mention in the movie. Sadly, though, the film manages to depict some of the band members' greatest regrets, said Sixx.

"The most painful part of the film is my relationship with my mother and how I could never mend that," Sixx told Forbes. "There is a scene where she is calling me and I can't pick up the phone. I'm addicted to drugs but have huge animosity because she abandoned me. Later I went to rehab and I got sober, but she passed away and we never reconciled. I regret that. I continue every day trying to be a better man but we could not close that gap."

In that sense, The Dirt is accurate enough to hurt.