Still from "The Dirt" (Jake Giles Netter/Netflix)
Still from “The Dirt” (Jake Giles Netter/Netflix)The new Motley Crue biopic The Dirt premieres Friday on Netflix. The film, based on the band’s collective 2001 autobiography of the same name, tells the story of group’s debauchery-filled rise during the ’80s rock scene on the Sunset Strip. But as bass player Nikki Sixx tells ABC Radio, The Dirt is also a family story.
“It was important to tell the backstory of each individual character, how we got to this family called Motley Crue, and then how we disintegrated,” Sixx explains. “And then how we had the courage to pull it together as a band and get out of our own way and make the music the #1 most important thing, which it was in the beginning.”
That story reflects Motley Crue’s real-life experience: By the time they played what was billed as their final show on New Year’s Eve 2015, Sixx says the members “weren’t talking.”
“That’s why we wrapped it up,” he explains. “We were grown-ups now, adults, with families, and saw things differently and had different interests, and had somehow lost the plot that Motley Crue was our first family.”
After a few years of silence, the band members reconciled, and ultimately ended up recording three new tracks for The Dirt, plus a cover of Madonna‘s “Like a Virgin.”
“We got in the studio, it was just magic,” Sixx remembers.
The Dirt stars Douglas Booth as Sixx, Daniel Webber as vocalist Vince Neil, rapper Machine Gun Kelly as drummer Tommy Lee and Iwan Rheon as guitarist Mick Mars. The actors were so good, Sixx says, that the band “forgot we were watching a movie about us.”
“In the beginning, you’re, like, ‘Oh, that guy’s really playing Vince great!'” Sixx says. “But then they completely erase all that and take over.”
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