You can’t manufacture an anarchic spirit. That’s what drags down “Pistol,” the bio-series from Danny Boyle that premieres in its six-episode entirety on FX on Hulu on May 31st. It has all the pretense of something as dangerous and form-breaking as the music of The Sex Pistols, but too little of the actual energy that the band thrust into the U.K. and beyond in the 1970s. It’s a show that’s filled with something that could be called “inauthentic authenticity.” Boyle obsesses over the fashion, music, and look of the mid-‘70s, but his show never transcends the superficial to find the beating heart of the kings of punk rock. Boyle’s overwhelming craft keeps most of it watchable, but it feels more like a show designed for fans of “Trainspotting” than fans of “God Save the Queen,” and that’s a problem. No one expects a filmmaker as brazen as the director of “Slumdog Millionaire” to take a back seat, but did he have to drive the whole time?
Writer Craig Pearce (a regular collaborator with Baz Luhrmann, including writing “Moulin Rouge!” and “The Great Gatsby”) adapts the book “Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol” by Steve Jones, which means most of this is from the founding member’s perspective. Played with a surprising flatness by Toby Wallace, who was excellent in the underrated “Babyteeth,” Jones channels his trauma into artistic expression, exploding with passion when he’s on stage in a way he can’t when he’s off. Everything changes for Jones with the arrival of the legendary Malcolm McLaren (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), who senses that he can do something with this boy’s band like he did with the New York Dolls. In 1974, Jones was in a band called The Strand (and sometimes The Swankers), whom he asked McLaren to manage. The music genius took what he saw in New York in the mid-‘70s and applied that same spirit to The Strand, even giving Jones the guitar of the legendary Sylvain Sylvain of Dolls fame as he encouraged him to find his own voice.
The group needed a real singer, someone to set the audience on fire. Everything changed in the summer of 1975 when a teenager named John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten (Anson Boon) joined the band. An improvised and raunchy performance over Alice Cooper’s “I’m Eighteen” convinced the Pistols to take on Lydon as a lead singer, and the rest was punk rock history. Raucous shows and unforgettable TV appearances would build a following for The Sex Pistols, and they were already famous when one of the group’s biggest fans replaced a fired bassist in 1977. Of course, his name was Sid Vicious (Louis Partridge). As a backdrop to the band’s rise to fame, “Pistol” incorporates some of the artists who would influence the band behind the scenes, including Pamela Rooke (Maisie Williams), Vivienne Westwood (Talulah Riley), Siouxsie Sioux (Beth Dillon), and Chrissie Hynde (Sydney Chandler), who as a friend and lover of Jones gives the show a grounded, female perspective when a break is needed from the macho male energy.
The biggest writing problem with the show, especially early on, is how much “Pistol” has a habit of spelling everything out through dialogue. The characters are constantly talking about what they want to do as artists in a way that punctures realism. And the show has a habit of rushing through well-known chapters in a way that feels like it’s checking off boxes instead of finding any truth or art in them. For example, Sid meets Nancy (Emma Appleton) and is a struggling addict roughly 30 seconds later. While Sid and Nancy had a well-recorded whirlwind of a relationship, it feels like the show is retelling this chapter merely because they know they have to and not to find anything new or true.
As with many projects about well-known superstars, “Pistol” is actually best when it gets away from the oft-told anecdotes. It’s more interesting in its smaller, human moments. And the best performances are on the fringe of the group. Chandler, in particular, is phenomenal, capturing how Hynde saw the fire and the fury in the Pistols in a way that made her put up with so much of their bullshit, even as they never took her seriously enough. (One absolutely wishes for a sequel series starring Chandler that charts Hynde’s ascendance with The Pretenders, certainly a lesser-known chapter of music history than this one.) Sangster is a very strong presence too, portraying McLaren as someone who understood so completely how image and art would intertwine in the era of punk and beyond. The guys, with the possible exception of a totally committed Boon, seem a little lost in the legends they’ve been asked to play. Wallace, in particular, too often feels like an observer. Maybe Jones was a bystander to chaos given the extreme personalities that were around him, but that doesn’t make for an interesting protagonist.
Where “Pistol” falls most of all is in the attention-grabbing craft. Boyle and his regular cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle shoot in 4:3 simply because it fits the time period? Maybe. There’s no real artistic reason beyond the choice other than to just make the show look different. Worse, Boyle edits the program to death, even more so than in his feature films, especially early episodes that feel aggressively hyperactive, as if he felt he needed to turn everything up to reflect what was happening in Steve Jones that would explode on stage in the Pistols. Hyperactive filmmaking with non-stop edits and showy angles only calls attention to itself and away from the subject. The Pistols themselves get lost in all the chaotic artistic decisions and the show becomes more about the image of the band than the people, the message, or even the music. God save us all. [C-]