FX’s ‘Pistol’ Is a Striking, Occasionally Abrasive Look at the Sex Pistols: TV Review
31.05.2022 - 17:17
/ variety.com
Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticSome of the most exciting filmmaking in “Pistol,” FX’s new Danny Boyle-directed limited series, happens onstage. In concert scenes featuring the Sex Pistols — the real-life punk pathbreakers at the center of this story — the camera toggles between performer and spectator, moving so rapidly that it seems to eliminate the distance between the two.
Director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle captures both staging in the foreground and expressive moshing in the background. The writhing performance seems less to spark violence in the audience than to run parallel to it, another expression of the free-floating anger in the air.It’s a canny way of depicting the Pistols’ appeal: The show argues that the band had an intuitive ability to tap into the rage of youth culture in pre-Thatcherite England.
It makes that argument eloquently by showing the group converting even small audiences, early on, into wild and emotional demonstrations. As the series wears on, however, “Pistol” begins to flag, losing both energy and an eye on what it’s trying to say.
Part of that may be a matter of perspective. “Pistol” is based on guitarist Steve Jones’ memoir “Lonely Boy: Tales From a Sex Pistol,” and it’s through his character, played by Toby Wallace, that we experience the band’s rise and brief time in the spotlight.
(Their one studio album, the iconic “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols,” was released in 1977.)This makes “Pistol” the second show of the season, after Paramount+’s “The Offer” — based on the recollections of a producer of “The Godfather” — to recount a story from pop-culture history from the point of view of one of its less electric participants. And it means that we see figures like
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