The Dirt (2019) * 1/2 (showing on Netflix)

Directed by:  Jeff Tremaine

Starring:  Douglas Booth, Machine Gun Kelly, Iwan Rheon, Daniel Webber, Tony Cavalero, Pete Davidson, David Costabile

The Dirt's opening scene gives us a sad indication of the road it will travel.    Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee (Machine Gun Kelly) gives a groupie oral pleasure and she climaxes by shooting streams of liquid from her vagina.   Uh huh.   The film's director is Jeff Tremaine, who directed Jackass 3D and now has the employed the same sensibilities to this otherwise standard biopic of a band which saw its heyday almost forty years ago.

If you believe everything in The Dirt, Motley Crue was a band who partied to near collapse and somewhere in between those parties recorded multi-platinum albums and toured incessantly.    The road was one big morass of drugs and sex, which led to nearly tragic consequences for all four of the group's members.    Nikki Sixx (Booth) became lost in a $1,000 per day heroin habit which almost killed him.    Vince Neil (Webber) killed a drummer from another band while drunk driving.    Tommy Lee marries and then is divorced from Heather Locklear, while Mick Mars (Rheon) suffers from a degenerative bone disease.    These guys aren't a lot of fun to be around, as their manager Doc McGhee (Costabile) and their Elektra Records representative Tom Zutaut (Davidson) found out.    Doc has the unfortunate job of handcuffing Tommy to his hotel room bedpost so he could sleep off all of the mayhem he caused the night before while in a drug-crazed haze.

Besides the woman squirting, we see a scene in which Ozzy Osbourne (Cavalero) snorts ants off of cement, urinates on the cement, and invites the band to join him in snorting and licking up the urine.
Who wants to watch this?    It is more vile than shocking, and soon The Dirt begins to feel like an extended Jackass episode.    If you like bodily fluids flying about with reckless abandon, this is your movie.   They are pretty much all accounted for.

Then, it decides to get serious as the band members begin suffering from the fallout of their years of partying and self abuse, but by this point the damage was done to themselves and the movie.   The most relatively sensible member of the band seems to be Mick Mars, who seems to like his vodka but otherwise generally avoids the self-destructive impulses of his bandmates.

Based on the band's 2001 tell-all book, some of which was reportedly exaggerated or simply tall tales, The Dirt hastily moves past the band's genesis and creation of some of their biggest hits.    I don't necessarily need a documentary on their music, but at least make it somewhat clear why a biopic of the band needed to be made and why they were a big deal way back when.    The Dirt is more focused on, well, the dirt.    There isn't much here which we haven't seen before in other rock biopics or even movies about fake rock bands.    The Dirt puts us through the same paces, without much energy or insight.   

The Dirt isn't into much else but the low road.    The band's music plays over the soundtrack, while the onstage performances are lip-synched.    This isn't new, and Bohemian Rhapsody made a boatload of money with more or less the same attitude toward its subject's music.    I don't know.   Lip synching doesn't bring much to the proceedings because I am constantly aware it is lip synching.    If I wanted to see Motley Crue or any other artist lip sync to a record, I would dig up an episode of Solid Gold.