Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Pistol’ on Hulu, A Riotously Visual, Danny Boyle-Directed Sex Pistols Biopic

UK punk rock pioneers The Sex Pistols get the origin story/biopic treatment in Pistol (Hulu), a six-episode limited series created by writer and regular Baz Luhrman collaborator Craig Pearce and Trainspotting director Danny Boyle. Steve Jones is a cocksure miscreant in 1970’s London when his half-assed band suddenly becomes an agit-prop cause celebre…

PISTOL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A smattering of grainy footage depicts everyday life in the United Kingdom under the Queen and Labour Party. Frowns on old folks’ faces. Drab clothing. Trade union strikes and garbage collector squabbles. Picket lines. And entertainment? Broad, milquetoast salves for the masses. Suddenly, Ziggy Stardust cuts through the rundown humdrum like neon through fog. “I’m an alligator,” David Bowie sings. “I’m a mama-papa comin’ for you.”

The Gist: Steve Jones (Toby Wallace) adores Bowie, and knows all his stage moves as Ziggy Stardust, the androgynous and otherwordly rock star leader of the Spiders from Mars. But he’s not above nicking Bowie’s equipment from the Hammersmith Odeon as the nightwatchman sleeps. Jones also joy rides a candy apple red MG through the nocturnal burrows of London with his friend Jacob Slater (Paul Cook), and the singer and drummer excitedly talk about rehearsals for their new band. The Sex Pistols we meet in “The Cloak of Invisibility,” “track 1” of Pistol, are still called The Swankers and barely a band at all. They’re “four working-class gits who can’t play for shit,” but they’ve got an curmudgeonly attitude informed by the depressed conditions of workaday London and staid British society, and that turns out to be Jones and his band’s calling card.

When Jones tries to lift a pair of bondage trousers from SEX, the edgy King’s Road boutique operated by Vivian Westwood (Talulah Riley) and Malcom McLaren (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), the duo takes a liking to the feisty roustabout. Steve also hits it off with Chrissie Hynde (Sydney Chandler), an American expat and aspiring musician who works in the shop. (Naturally, Jones and the future Pretenders founder bond over Bowie and Mick Ronson, specifically the guitar solo on “Starman.”) For Malcolm, it’s the “raw authenticity of forgotten kids” like Steve that turns him on, while Viv sees rock music as an avenue for her convention-challenging fashions. And McLaren, fresh off his experiments in provocation with The New York Dolls, agrees to manage Steve’s band, which he renames The Sex Pistols. But to do that, he has to rescue his charge from the dock, where Steve is standing trial for trying to steal Hawkwind’s equipment.

Steve, the forgotten and abused child of a broken marriage and stints in juvie, has always relied on his “cloak of invisibility” to get by. Nobody notices a working class kid with no future, so that means he can’t be seen, which makes thieving easy. But when he gets on stage for the first time, Steve quickly realizes that the cloak doesn’t work. The Sex Pistols have damage, and swagger, and hunger. They also have Malcom McLaren as their ideology and marketing benefactor. But they’re still figuring out how to be a band.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The recent biographical drama Pam & Tommy had a lot of fun casting actors to play the real figures of a different, though equally hedonistic and outsized era, as did The Dirt, which took Neill Strauss’s Motley Crue biography to the screen with largely unknown actors playing the band members.

Our Take: “They’re terrible!” her boyfriend says of the Sex Pistols at one of their formative gigs, and Chrissie Hynde agrees. “It’s great!” Pistol gets neck deep into the rawness and combustion of punk rock as it came to life in 1970’s England. But it’s also careful to present its subject as a relatively empty vessel that became a mechanism for larger forces at work. Steve Jones and his bandmates saw themselves as forgotten members of society, and didn’t want their music to sound anything like those squares in the Fab Four. But it took Malcom McLaren’s knack for provocative marketing and Vivian Westwood’s flair for visual messaging to orient them on a difference-making path. Pistol frequently blends archival footage into its storyline, and uses film effects to great advantage, often combining the two with nearly seamless precision to give the material a really strong sense of place. And by the closing notes of “Track 1,” that place has heard the bratty, scattershot clamor of what will become the Sex Pistols.

Much of the young cast, mostly unknowns, does fine work here. Toby Wallace, who once played INXS’s Michael Hutchence in an Australian TV movie, is at once brash and vulnerable as Steve Jones, and Sydney Chandler is a revelation as Chrissie Hynde. Chandler plays her as wary and jaded, but also whip smart and still eager to embrace rock ‘n’ roll’s elusive promise. (In later episodes, more notable figures from the Sex Pistols pop up, including Siouxsie Sioux, Billy Idol, and Richard Branson.) Thomas Brodie-Sangster, of the Maze Runner films and The Queen’s Gambit, is also a delight in Pistol as Malcom McLaren, who he renders as part raconteur, part Warholian shit-stirrer, and part coldblooded businessman. Whatever the accuracy of the story it wants to tell – in the run-up to filming there were bouts of bickering between John Lydon, the rest of the Sex Pistols, and the filmmakers over rights to songs and details and such – Pistol is a well-acted visual treat with the beat of the punk rock ethos in its heart.

Sex and Skin: Chrissie and her boyfriend at the time, rock critic Nick Kent, are seen in the altogether. There’s some necking and the fogging up of windows in parked cars.

Parting Shot: The Sex Pistols’ first gig goes off the rails when Steve freaks out and stomps off the stage, his issues with abandonment and personhood stemming from an abusive childhood welling up inside. “I act tough,” he tells the Pistols’ drummer, his friend Paul Cook. “But when I get up there, I’ve got nowhere to hide.” And as Steve wanders into the London night, John Lydon (Anson Boon), the band’s soon-to-be singer, emerges.

Sleeper Star: Where is the long overdue biopic about Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders? And can Sydney Chandler star in that, too?

Most Pilot-y Line: “Everybody’s pretending everythings’ normal, like ‘Rule Britannia’ and all that shit. But really, everything is falling apart. And all of us poor fuckers who’ve got nothing, we’re supposed to stand there and shut up and sing “God Save the Queen,” and that’s sort of mental.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Pistol is a fun watch, rife with visual flourishes and emboldened by a strong cast on top of its otherwise by-the-book music biopic boilerplate.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges