The “stupid and vile” movie Courtney Love called the worst she’d ever seen: “Just fucking dumb”
Even though she’s been one of the more prolific musicians who’ve dabbled in acting, Courtney Love has always tended to keep Hollywood at arm’s length, and there are several reasons why.
For one thing, she’s never been interested in playing the political game. It’s absolutely not a coincidence that she was effectively blacklisted from the movie business for a decade after saying the quiet part out loud and commenting on one of Tinseltown’s dirtiest secrets long before it became a scandal.
In 2005, Love was asked if she had any advice for aspiring actors looking to break into the business, and while she suggested that she’d be opening herself up to legal action, her words were horrifically prophetic: “If Harvey Weinstein invites you to a private party at the Four Seasons, don’t go.”
In her own words, that got her “eternally banned” by the talent agency CAA for her comments, and it wasn’t until 2017 that the disgraced producer faced the consequences of his actions. As a result of that silent blacklisting, 2002’s Trapped was her last role in a feature until the made-for-television film Menendez: Blood Brothers premiered 15 years later.
A couple of bridges were also burned along the way, with Love claiming that Brad Pitt had her fired from Fight Club when she refused to grant him the rights to a Kurt Cobain biopic, although the other side of the story suggested that David Fincher never planned on casting her in the literary adaptation to begin with.
The Hole frontwoman has proven herself a talented actor, earning a Golden Globe nomination for her performance in The People vs Larry Flynt, in addition to standout turns in Sid and Nancy, Basquiat, and Man on the Moon. She knows the music industry like the back of her hand, and she knows more than enough about Hollywood, and when the two were combined for a biopic, she fucking hated the results.
In his first attempt at narrative filmmaking, Jackass veteran Jeff Tremaine directed the Mötley Crüe biopic, The Dirt. It’s a million miles away from being one of its genre’s finest efforts, mostly because it’s not very good at all, but it didn’t get many more scathing reviews than the one it got from Love. “We watched the dumbest Netflix film ever called The Dirt,” she told Interview. “It’s so stupid and vile about women, and just fucking dumb.”
She watched it with her friends, and knowing how deeply the band’s misadventures are woven into pop culture history, it was nothing if not predictable. “We just made jokes,” she continued. “I was like, ‘When’s Ozzy gonna snort the ant?’ Then, within seconds, he snorted the ant. Then the Nikki Sixx character was like, ‘I have a new girlfriend. She’s sweet. She’s wonderful.’ I was like, ‘And her name was heroin’. Two seconds later: ‘Her name is heroin’. I was killing it.”
The co-creator of Jackass helming a Mötley Crüe biopic for Netflix with Machine Gun Kelly in the cast was never going to be a barometer of onscreen excellence, but the heavy helpings of misogyny and paint-by-numbers storytelling tipped it over the edge for Love, who thought it was the stupidest thing she’d ever seen.
