The Danny Boyle-directed miniseries chronicles the meteoric rise and crash of the Sex Pistols amid the late 1970s London punk scene, based on the memoir by guitarist Steve Jones.
Perhaps it’s understandable that biopics of singularly influential artists
so rarely live up to the creative brio of their subjects.
After all, it’d be a challenge for any work of art to recreate the lightning-in-a-bottle
Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, even one whose raison d’être is primarily explaining how and why Never Mind the Bollocks came to exist.
FX’s six-episode miniseries Pistol does try valiantly to capture
some of the band’s spirit in its frenetic, freewheeling style
courtesy of director Danny Boyle.
But these efforts are in service of a narrative that, though often compelling,