Critical knives have been out for Danny Boyle’s new six-part biopic series on punk provocateurs the Sex Pistols since last year, when photos emerged of the young cast looking like the schoolboys from the Inbetweeners.
This week Pistol (Disney+) finally arrived, and viewers got to make up their mind.
The five and a bit hour series has flaws, but it’s still the most relevant and exciting thing Boyle has made since Trainspotting in 1996.
Pistol also contains some of Trainspotting’s flaws, throwing together a veneer of self-conscious youth coolness with a group of damaged, unloved people, many of whom destroy their lives with heroin addiction.
Based on memoir Lonely Boy
Based on Steve Jones’s 2017 memoir Lonely Boy, the Pistols guitarist is the central character.
Although that relegates John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, to the supporting cast, Jones is the best choice from a storytelling perspective.
Only he and mild-mannered drummer Paul Cook were with the band from their pre-Pistols days as the Swankers, until their implosion following a disastrous US tour and the death of the wayward Sid Vicious from a heroin overdose in America in 1979.
The link in the weird bubble
Jones is also the key Pistol who best links the group’s weird bubble and the bemused reality going on around them.
The actor who plays him, Toby Wallace – a British-born Australian who’s also been INXS’ Michael Hutchence onscreen – paints a compelling picture as a strong lead.
This Steve Jones is damaged by his stepfather’s sexual abuse and his mother’s perceived abandonment.
He takes his frustrations out on the world with petty crime – at one point stealing his hero David Bowie’s equipment from the stage – and compulsive, unhappy sexual flings.
Chrissie Hyde and a cricket bat
He tries to shoplift from the infamous SEX shop and is almost beaten with a cricket bat by the assistant, a pre-fame Chrissie Hynde, played streetwise but sensible by Sydney Chandler in a real breakthrough performance.
Hanging around the shop, he falls under the wing of tailor/revolutionary/working mother Vivienne Westwood (Talulah Riley) and wily middle-class spiv Malcolm McLaren (Thomas Brodie-Sangster).
Jones develops a fatherly connection to McLaren, just nine years his senior, when the latter’s character reference keeps him out of jail, and an occasionally sexual friendship with the ambitious but balanced Hynde.
The Pretenders singer was an advisor on the series, so we might presume there’s truth in this account.
With each new Pistol – Anson Boon’s memorably wayward and antisocial Rotten and Louis Partridge’s not very bright Sid Vicious, who fights people so they pay attention to him – the band’s collection of little-boys-lost becomes more dangerous.
Maisie Williams a revelation
Amid a bunch of strong and faithful performances, Maisie Williams is the biggest revelation as SEX model Jordan, who died last month, all cut-glass composure while doing the suburban commute in a breast-baring plastic raincoat.
The faithful reproductions of classic moments like the infamous Thames cruise past Parliament are of secondary enjoyment to the sheer visual and musical energy of the show. It looks and sounds perfect, even at its scuzziest.
If writer Craig Pearce (Strictly Ballroom, Moulin Rouge) hasn’t shied away from unlikely sentimentality in places, he and Boyle at least reimagine punk not as a nostalgia trip, but as a twisted, sometimes disturbing call to the young and dispossessed for the first time in decades.
