Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticSome of the most exciting filmmaking in “Pistol,” FX’s new Danny Boyle-directed limited series, happens onstage.
In concert scenes featuring the Sex Pistols — the real-life punk pathbreakers at the center of this story — the camera toggles between performer and spectator, moving so rapidly that it seems to eliminate the distance between the two.
Director of photography Anthony Dod Mantle captures both staging in the foreground and expressive moshing in the background.
The writhing performance seems less to spark violence in the audience than to run parallel to it, another expression of the free-floating anger in the air.It’s a canny way of depicting the Pistols’ appeal: The show argues that the band had an intuitive ability to tap into the rage of youth culture in pre-Thatcherite England.
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