Given this material, "The Filth and the Fury" is, not surprisingly, a kinetic and unstoppable ride. Temple met the band in London during one of its first rehearsals. On the way to becoming an established filmmaker ("Absolute Beginners" and "Earth Girls Are Easy," among others"), he and McLaren put together "The Great Rock 'n Roll Swindle," a by-turns compelling and unwatchable fake documentary on the Pistols. (One unappetizing scene has Cook and Jones, in Rio de Janiero, doing naked jumping jacks on a beach with a wanted British bank robber, Ronnie Biggs.) Rotten and the band now view that film as a piece of McLaren-esque propaganda, but have brought Temple back into the fold as a documentarian for hire. (Oddly, a major chunk of the new movie -- perhaps as much as 20 percent -- is recycled "Swindle" footage.)

"The Filth and the Fury" has essentially but one trick, but it's a good one: Temple simply lets the England of the time -- or at least what Temple wants us to believe was the England of the time -- hang itself. The film begins with a few seconds of footage of an impossibly square, clumsy weatherman, and then launches directly into a swirling collage of street riots, chaos and various species of social collapse. Rotten and Vicious are introduced with shots of them spitting into the camera lens. The film is dotted with what's apparently meant as hugely sardonic clips of lame comedians from British TV; most Americans will find them puzzling. There's also this or that news footage of ranting British racists and various town councilors fighting to keep the band from playing in their community.

The news footage is most effective during an earsplitting "Anarchy in the U.K." sequence, when, in the song's climactic verse, in which Rotten reels off a list of terrorist group acronyms, Temple shockingly cuts in explosions that hit on the last letter of each groups' name. ("Is this the MPLA [blast!]?/Is this the UDA [blast!]?") There is a lot of home movie footage and film from smaller, early shows. (Most of this, irritatingly, has studio versions of Pistols' songs played over them. "Swindle" used the live tracks.)

Otherwise, the film rips through a Pistols-centric version of history, Rotten at the core: Grundy, "God Save the Queen," the last British show, the American tour, the death of Vicious. There are intermittent glimpses into the things that fueled Rotten's seemingly unstoppable rage, like his description of the lumpen members of the band putting down his epochal opening lines to "Anarchy in the U.K." -- "I am an antichrist/I am an anarchist" -- on the grounds that they didn't rhyme. At moments like this you feel for him. In his autobiography, he captures his perspective on such indignities with perhaps the most deromanticized portrait of rock 'n' roll ever committed to paper: "I don't care how big-headed the lead singer is, it all comes down to the fact that he must eat shit in the rehearsal room. The histrionics of the lead guitar, the excesses of the drummer and the stupidity of the bass player have to meet on equal footing."

Though his face is hidden, it's apparent at one point that Rotten is reduced to tears while remembering the grotesque end of his best friend. It's undoubtedly sincere, but the uncharitable may well reflect that, had the young Rotten viewed Mick Jagger, say, similarly eulogizing Brian Jones, he would have spit at the screen. It's a Barbara Walters moment. I'd always taken the title of one of Lydon's Public Image albums, "The Flowers of Romance," to be his unspoken tribute to Vicious -- that had been the name of a band Vicious had been associated with before the Sex Pistols. In his autobiography, Lydon admits he hadn't been the friend he should have been but treats Vicious' life with lancing sarcasm as well: "He took it all too far, and boy, he couldn't play guitar. David Bowie reference." In the film he remains unforgiving -- "He became the worst sort of rock 'n' roll idiot you could have had a nightmare about" -- and delivers a shattering epitaph: "All I'm telling you is that I could take on England, but I could not take on one heroin addict."

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While there is much to enjoy here for any music fan and particularly those for whom the Pistols represented a shocking cultural revelation in the late 1970s, the film fails on so many levels it's difficult to take it seriously. A documentary controlled by the people it's about is never entirely satisfying. (Temple has made it plain in interviews that he was a hired gun.) While to some extent its intent -- presenting a coherent history of the band from the point of view of its members -- is defensible, there is enough missing to make you wish a legitimate, independent documentarian had had access to the same material.

There is far too much wild-in-the-streets footage and a bit too much trumpeting about the band members' working-class origins. (I was waiting for someone to claim to be depraved on account of being deprived.) Their sometimes violent antics are not glossed over -- there's priceless footage of Nick Kent, the then-reigning British rock journalist, telling of Vicious' chain attack on him -- but these are not quite portrayed on the sociopathic levels on which I suspect they existed. (Kent wasn't the only person Vicious attacked with a chain.)

And to watch "The Filth and the Fury" you'd think that the band members had sprung full-blown in a burst of spontaneous social realism. I caught a split-second mention of the New York Dolls; if there was mention of the Stooges or the Ramones I missed it. McLaren is dismissed with derisive footage from "Swindle" of him in a leather bondage mask, generally saying stupid things. Why be a punk if you can't settle some scores? Rotten might argue; he doesn't see how the puerility of the device lessens his stature, not increases it.

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