You come away wishing McLaren had had a chance to speak for himself. One of the funnier moments in the film comes when Rotten talks about being relegated to a bus with Vicious during the American tour. The rest of the band stayed in nice hotels; "We had to stay" -- here Rotten conjures up his most indignant drawl -- "in MO-tels!" The moment is set up to make you feel sorry for poor neglected Johnny and Sid, but I'm on McLaren, Cook and Jones' side on this one. By this point, traveling on a bus with Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious had crossed over the line of unpleasantness and into the realm of the physically dangerous.

The lack of an independent perspective will make certain parts of the story mystifying to the uninitiated. The single most salient point about that excruciating American tour, for example, is that McLaren deliberately booked it across the hinterland, refusing to kowtow to the media centers he and the band held in contempt. After some cancellations in the North, the tour devolved down to a series of literally blood-streaked shows across the Deep South. The suicidal result was surely one of the most astonishing marketing debacles in the history of popular entertainment, and it's a curious artifact of the oddly romantic, slightly deranged philosophy that drove McLaren and the band.

And finally, the film misses two points that any tale of the Sex Pistols has to make. The first, ironically, is probably missing because of modesty. The nine vertiginous guitar down-strokes that open "Anarchy" speak for themselves. But Rotten was more than just a front person. He was also, strange to say, a poet, one of stark and ugly but undeniable gifts. He took the obvious, almost clichid language of denial or protest and repeatedly created moments that really did seem to threaten the "third-rate reality" he sensed around him. And he did it with such force that the songs still, as an onlooker at the time put it, raise "hundreds of questions."

To this day, the standard vocabulary of pop culture can't account for Rotten's onstage presence. He was misshapen and up to no good, a sadistic, starved Rumpelstiltskin or Quasimodo; as he sang, his r's, when he wanted them to, trilled like chainsaws. His manic eyes and rigid body suggested brittle, dangerous extremes. The recordings he made (and here the band was helped mightily by producer Chris Thomas) are so hard that they are grating and difficult to listen to casually to this day. Ramones and Clash songs are now practically classic-rock staples; Sex Pistols tracks are virtually never played on commercial radio.

Rotten was also a master of the multiplicity of meanings that has made the early days of the British punk moment catnip for social theoreticians in the years since. To cite just one obvious example: The fact that "antichrist" and "anarchist" didn't rhyme is one of the points of "Anarchy in the U.K." It isn't a song about wanting to shoot passersby; it's a song about offending people who'd be offended by a song about such a thing. The fractured rhyme is merely a lagniappe, a sign to the listeners that, among other things, the weapons in the debate have changed, that certain rules were no longer being observed. (Among other things, it says, "Fuck you, Paul McCartney.")

"Anarchy" doesn't rhyme; it's incoherent; its lyrics violate many accepted rules of grammar. But its message is unmistakable. After a contemptuous belch buried in the "guitar solo" that precedes the last verse, Rotten launches into the nonsensical litany of armed groups and closes the song with his finest vocal moment, a heroic, raspy, strained pair of lines ("I thought it was the U.K./Or just another country") that on the page seem anticlimactic but on record, addressed to a land that dearly wishes to think of itself as not just another country, are derisive, desperate, forlorn and defiant. Not one of rock's love balladeers, not one of its jut-jawed protesters, has ever sounded so lost.

The songs speak for themselves, but they also deserve, in a film of this sort, some level of explication. "Holidays in the Sun," illustrated here with footage of the band in Berlin, is really about something strange and terrifying. The singer, apparently a vacuous middle-class British tourist, begins, "I don't want a holiday in the sun/I wanna see the new Belsen."

It's a brilliantly confrontational opening. Rotten manages to implicate an entire class in the diminution of the Holocaust even as he uses the name of a concentration camp as a punch line. He rolls on: "I want to see some history," he howls delightedly, his character spouting wan Marxisms even as the singer somehow delivers a wicked trill on every syllable of the key word. He finds his history, and himself, at song's end, staring over the Berlin Wall. (The wall was still a potent symbol of tyranny then, less than 15 years after it was built.) What he finds is unexpected: "I'm looking over the wall and they're looking at me!" From there the singer, his voice, sound uncertain: He's come, recklessly, for a merry glimpse of the ghosts of Nazism and fascism and, disconcertingly, finds them looking for the same thing in him. The resulting cognitive dissonance ends the song in a hail of incoherence.

Which brings us, finally, to the second thing the movie can't bring itself to recognize -- the great cosmic joke that was the Sex Pistols. What are the chances of a low-rent provocateur like McLaren finding in his store a grimy musician whose contribution to history would be those nine momentous chords? And given that, what are the odds that that same person could walk out on the street and almost randomly pick arguably the only person alive on Earth at that moment who could possibly have made his dream of a rock band that might destroy pop music a reality? And that together the group and the manager would indeed create not only, as he called it in "Swindle," "the most notorious filthy disgusting dirtiest rock 'n' roll band in the whole bloody world," but also, in "Never Mind the Bollocks," a signal work of transgressive pop art whose force has not lessened over the passage of more than two decades?

This was history's last laugh: Art erupts in the damnedest places. Lydon's unapologetic activities in the years since -- cloying dance music for suburban teens with the latter-day PiL, a gleefully remunerative reunion tour -- were encoded in his original hauteur and contempt for propriety; he wasn't doing anything we didn't expect him to. What does catch us off guard is to see him display -- nakedly, for once -- a need for the future's approbation. He ends up haranguing us about what "the truth" is, when the one thing we know for sure about the truth is that it rarely comes from the guy trying to sell it to us. For the first time in 25 years, we wonder: That cackle we hear; is it Rotten's -- or history's?

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