Hynde (played by Sydney Chandler) serves as Jones’s love interest and a kind of moral center amid all the nihilism and heartlessness, an attempt to modernize the story by making a fearless female into a central figure.

Wary of a distorted Pistols history (and perhaps unhappy about a saga recentered around the guitarist rather than himself), singer Rotten tried and failed to prevent the show from using the band’s music- predicting Pistol would just be “a fairytale, which bears little resemblance to the truth.” If the shift from the standard focus on Rotten and the self-destructive Sid Vicious is at least refreshing, Pistol does take liberties with history by pushing Chrissie Hynde to the fore of this six-episode narrative. But as today’s therapeutic culture requires, there’s an explanatory backdrop that sources and justifies his delinquency: parental neglect, trauma, and bad education.

We first see young Steve fusing his two teenage passions-rock music and petty crime-by sneaking backstage at a Bowie concert and running off with some top-of-the-line equipment. In this iteration, Jones (charismatically rendered by Toby Wallace) becomes the prime mover: the street urchin who formed the band, earned them instant national infamy by swearing on live television, and whose bruising riffs defined the Sex Pistols sound. The series is based on Lonely Boy, a candid memoir by Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, one of the less mythologized figures in the chronicling of punk. The scene involved a confusing maze of impulses and aims, a collision of unlikely and often damaged individuals, each of whom cries out to be characterized and back-storied. But Pearce, whose previous exploits include collaborating with Baz Luhrmann on Moulin Rouge! and the forthcoming Elvis, struggles with the admittedly gargantuan challenge of forging a narrative out of the birth of punk. That is what director Danny Boyle and writer Craig Pearce set out to do in the FX on Hulu limited series Pistol.Ī pro at making deprivation look exciting via Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle lashes together period footage of cruddy old England in the 1970s (when many believed the country was in irreversible decline) with word-perfect reenactments of the Pistols’ most infamous performances and TV appearances.

The band lasted only a short time, but its turbulent existence has been documented so diligently in the subsequent decades-and absorbed so thoroughly by the culture it was trying to demolish-that it’s hard to scrape back the layers of nostalgia and see punk afresh. “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” That was Johnny Rotten’s famous kiss-off to the audience at his final Sex Pistols concert in San Francisco, in January 1978.

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