It's been 44 years since the Sex Pistols broke up and only a couple more since they played their first gig, having produced only one actual album in their lifetime. And yet they seem very much with us; the best of their music continues to sound massively huge, outside of time and trend.
The 2016 memoir of guitarist Steve Jones, "Lonely Boy," has been adapted into "Pistol," a miniseries directed by Danny Boyle ("Trainspotting," et al.) and written by Baz Luhrmann's go-to scenarist, Craig Pearce. The singular form of the title tells us that the series, which premiered Tuesday on FX on Hulu, is not the story of the band so much as of a particular member — a bias, or angle, quickly apparent from what's onscreen. Even John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, who for many is the Sex Pistol, takes a bit of a back seat. Inevitably, there is an episode titled "Nancy and Sid" — that's bass player Sid Vicious — because a movie called "Sid and Nancy," which nailed the Pistols' legacy to its tragic last act rather than its triumphant first, practically demands it.
Pistolologists will notice omissions and revisions, but the series hits the big factual points. (If you regard well-documented 40-something-year-old history as a spoiler, you might want to skip down a few paragraphs.) Steve Jones (Toby Wallace), then nominally a singer, drummer Paul Cook (Jacob Slater) and bassist Glen Matlock (Christian Lees), along with footnote guitarist Wally Nightingale (Dylan Llewellyn), have a band of no visible success or audible aptitude called the Swankers. A working-class kid with a penchant for sometimes spectacular thievery, Jones has been hanging out at Sex, a cutting-edge clothing store run by designer Vivienne Westwood (Talulah Riley, in an especially good rendering of a someone seriously at work) and her boyfriend, Malcolm McLaren (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), a semi-pompous cultural provocateur with a foot in rock 'n' roll. After some hectoring from Jones, McLaren agrees to manage his band.
