The Dirt (2019)
Directed by Jeff Tremaine
No — The Dirt is not woke, scoring 3 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
The Dirt arrives as a Netflix production of the Mötley Crüe memoir, a source that was never going to produce a tract.
Consciousness Markers
The cast is overwhelmingly white and male, reflecting the actual demographics of the band and its milieu; no meaningful effort at inclusive or color-conscious casting.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext of any kind.
The film wallows in groupies, mud-wrestler wives, and casual misogyny without critique; it was widely criticized for its handling of women as disposable props.
No engagement with racial politics or consciousness whatsoever.
No environmental themes present.
The film celebrates the band's reckless spending and excess rather than critiquing it; no anti-capitalist framing.
No body positivity themes; the aesthetic is pure 80s hair-metal glamour.
Mick Mars's ankylosing spondylitis is a physical condition, not neurodivergence, and is not framed through any neurodiversity lens.
The film is adapted from the band's own self-mythologizing autobiography, but it does not revise history in the ideological sense the marker denotes.
The film is a debauched, hedonistic romp with no didactic or moralizing impulse; it pointedly avoids lecturing about the band's troubling behavior.
Why it received this score
The Dirt arrives as a Netflix production of the Mötley Crüe memoir, a source that was never going to produce a tract. Jeff Tremaine directs the rise, the overdoses, and the reconciliations with a fan's affection and a Wikipedia entry's sense of pacing. Critics were unimpressed. The band's more troubling behaviors are staged, enjoyed, and left largely unexamined, which the film's detractors treated as a failure and which, in the taxonomy of our present inquiry, reads as a clean sheet.
The cast is white and male in near-unison, a fidelity to the historical record that leaves no room for the color-conscious gestures we have come to expect. Women pass through as groupies, a mud wrestler, and wives, and the camera regards them the way a tour bus regards a roadside attraction. There is no queer presence, no environmental conscience, and no reckoning with the fortunes the band burns through. Money is spent, snorted, and thrown from hotel windows. Nobody suggests the arrangement is unjust.
Mick Mars suffers from ankylosing spondylitis, a condition of the spine, which is not the same as a neurological difference and is not presented as one. The film draws from the band's own self-mythologizing, which is not the ideological reworking of history this office tracks. And the sermon is absent entirely. No character turns to the lens to instruct us on consent, excess, or the treatment of women. It is a picture about terrible men having a wonderful time, and it declines, with some discipline, to apologize for them.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
The story of Mötley Crüe and their rise from the Sunset Strip club scene of the early 1980s to superstardom.
Questions about The Dirt
Is The Dirt woke?
No — The Dirt is not woke, scoring 3 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The Dirt have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Representation Casting at 8.
How does The Dirt compare to other 2019 movies?
It ranks #263 of the 284 films from 2019 we've scored; their average is 22. The wokest is Black Christmas (79).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.