Where’s the anarchy? Danny Boyle’s Sex Pistols biopic has been Disney-fied

A drama about the Sex Pistols should be a riot. Yet Pistol (Disney+) is so lacking in anarchic spirit that it may as well be a Coldplay biopic.

What has gone wrong here? Danny Boyle is the director who gave us Trainspotting, a film that crackled with energy. The blame must lie with the studio because – odd as it may sound for a show featuring sex, drugs and a great deal of swearing – the end product feels Disney-fied.

It is a conventional retelling, ticking off all the staging posts in the Sex Pistols story: first meeting with Malcolm McLaren, first gig, the infamous Bill Grundy interview, the Jubilee boat trip. The script is based on the memoir of guitarist Steve Jones but the sanitised tone makes lines of dialogue sound like they’re taken from a CBBC show, even if that’s how it really happened. Witness the origin story of Sid Vicious, aka John Ritchie:

Johnny Rotten: “We’ll call you Sid, after the hamster.”

Ritchie, playing with the hamster and receiving a nip to his finger: “Ow. Sid’s really vicious…”

The casting is hit-and-miss, the biggest miss being baby-faced Thomas Brodie-Sangster (forever the annoying child from Love Actually) as McLaren. The character is unbearable, but it’s difficult to know if that’s deliberate or down to Brodie-Sangster’s hammy performance.

Jones is the centre of the story and we often get taken back to his traumatic childhood at the hands of an abusive stepfather. Toby Wallace does a creditable job in the role, particularly with the accent (he is Australian but you’d never know it). As the other band members, Anson Boon does liven things up as Rotten, and Louis Partridge introduces us to a sweet and not terribly bright Vicious, before the Nancy Spungen nightmare. Talulah Riley plays Vivienne Westwood at the midpoint between Bubble from Absolutely Fabulous and Mrs Hall from All Creatures Great and Small.

As a visual accompaniment to a Wikipedia entry, it’s passable. But the storytelling is so superficial that the Sid and Nancy episode – which should be a gut punch – barely registers. The most engaging character isn’t one of the band, but Chrissie Hynde (Sydney Chandler); the strongest performance is from Bianca Stephens as a footnote in the band’s story, a disturbed young woman who inspired the track Bodies.

The editing is overpowering, constantly throwing archive footage into the mix. It feels made for US viewers who need a paint-by-numbers guide to Britishness. John Lydon was right to refuse involvement in this Great Disney Swindle.