Blame it on Netflix’s aggressive push for original content, but a lot of progress has been made on the Motley Crüe biopic since we first learned that the streaming company was interested in adapting the band’s 2001 memoir, The Dirt: Confessions Of The World’s Most Notorious Rock Band. The production’s found a director in, appropriately enough, Jackass franchise helmer Jeff Tremaine, and tapped Rich Wilkes (xXx) and Tom Kapinos (Californication) to write the script. Now there’s some casting news: Pitchfork reports Machine Gun Kelly (whose real name is the decidedly-less-rock-’n’-roll Colson Baker) will play Tommy Lee.
As for his bona fides, Kelly’s released three rap albums, was a regular on Roadies, and has a whole mess of tattoos, one of which is a characteristic he shares with Lee, the Crüe’s longtime drummer. There’s currently no word on just how much of the Dirt from the book will make it into the film, so we’ll leave you with this excerpt about Lee from Nathan Rabin’s review:
Tommy Lee, meanwhile, comes off like a puppy with a raging erection, multimillion-dollar bank account, and bottomless appetite for booze, weed, coke, and women. He’s a surfer-dude space cadet with a vocabulary rich in “dudes” and “bros,” a consummate dude’s bro who’d come off as sweet if he didn’t do things like, say, rape a girl in a closet alongside Nikki Sixx early in his career, physically attack wife Pamela Anderson, or degrade groupies in ways that are immoral, if not outright illegal. In The Dirt, even the great big puppy of a drummer is a loathsome degenerate.