I gather from interviews that writer-director Danny Boyle really loves the Sex Pistols. “It sounds a bit pretentious, obviously, but I was sort of destined to do this,” he said in a recent interview. “I knew I would have to [make a punk film] at some point.” Given this sense of mission, I’m not quite sure how to take Boyle’s six-episode FX/Hulu series, Pistol, about the short-lived but wildly influential band.

For starters, he relies heavily on Steve Jones’s 2017 memoir Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol. That means tons of material about how Steve Jones (Toby Wallace) was a sensitive fellow damaged by a wretched working-class childhood under the control of a bullying wanker of a father. And tons more about what appears to be Jones’s own assessment of himself as the mostly sane central figure in the band of often malevolent nutters.

There’s also tons about his supposedly on-again, off-again, hot and heavy, super-meaningful romance with pre-Pretenders Chrissie Hynde (Sydney Chandler). Boyle congratulates himself on how he and writer Craig Pearce finally give the women involved in the band’s turbulent odyssey their due, with unusually in-depth portraits of designer Vivienne Westwood (Talulah Riley), fashion icon Jordan née Pamela Rooke (Maisie Williams), chaos-catalylist Nancy Spungen (Emma Appleton), and especially Hynde. “There was a very quiet, inexorably ticking bomb, that she would arrive and eclipse all of them,” says Boyle. “Who knows how many other girls were frustrated by getting short shrift — even though punk was pretty good for allowing in women.”