![]() ![]() Production designer and Trainspotting alum Kave Quinn does a more-than-solid job depicting the brutal desolation of 1970s Britain, with its toxic fumes of faded Imperial braggadocio, but the gutter-and stardust-origins of punk rock and the Pistols were about much more than the look or even the times. Tossing in a Bowie cameo of sorts, the erratically paced Pistol is pretty much a boys club, with Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams adrift as punk icon Jordan and the trio of Chrissie Hynde (Sydney Chandler), Vivienne Westwood (Talulah Riley) and Nancy Spungen (Emma Appleton) mostly mishandled. Where that film went for the iconic, this show leans into dull convention. ![]() That sort of faux pas and slippage through Boyle and Pearce’s undeniably talented hands is in no small part how Pistol stumbles away from all that was so towering about 1986’s Alex Cox-directed Sid & Nancy, starring Gary Oldman. Damningly, Pistol’s greatest achievement may be its ability to render the manipulative and occasionally incandescent McLaren, as played here by impish The Queen’s Gambit’s Thomas Brodie-Sangster, as a dim “lost little boy.” As the constructed band themselves, Wallace’s Jones, Anson Boon’s Lydon/Rotten, Louis Partridge’s Sid Vicious, Jacob Slater’s drummer Paul Cook, and Christian Lees as original bassist Glen Matlock are merely pawns in Boyle and Pearce’s nostalgia game. ![]() That’s not something you are going to find much of in the Behind the Music-formatted Pistol. ![]()
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