Nearly 28 years after his death at age 22, L.A. punk rock pioneer Darby Crash begins to get his due in the biopic “What We Do Is Secret,” which, like its tormented antihero, covers too much ground in too little time.
The film attempts to convey, in a mere 92 minutes, not only the forces at play (more like at war) inside the Germs' star-crossed singer's drug-addled brain, but also the elements that shaped the L.A. punk scene of the mid-to late-1970s.
At times, “What We Do ,” directed by newcomer Rodger Grossman, rings true. Germs songs are faithfully performed by the actors, who were taught to play by Germs guitarist Pat Smear, the film's musical director, with an assist from former band mates Lorna Doom and Don Bolles.
But the movie, which opens tomorrow for a one-week engagement at the Ken Cinema in Kensington, is hobbled by a faux-documentary interview format that gives the film a made-for-TV hokeyness.
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“What We Do Is Secret”
Rated: R
Opens: Tomorrow
Running time: 1 hr., 32 min.
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Grossman also tries to foist undue sense and structure – Darby Crash (born Jan Paul Beahm) as a lucid, intelligent but tragic visionary with a five-year plan – on an underground scene marked by violence, depravity and nihilism.
Crash (Shane West) opines in one interview sequence that the band was so-named because “everything starts with a germ.” To which Smear (Rick Gonzalez) adds: “Or maybe it's because we played so bad we made everyone sick.”
The performance re-enactments, the real highlight of “What We Do Is Secret,” are energizing though brief and suggest, perhaps too generously, that the Germs were a tight band. (Chuck Vess of Lou's Records in Encinitas was barely a teenager when he saw the Germs numerous times at such L.A. hot spots as Madame Wong's and the Starwood. Although he recalled Crash as “enigmatic,” Smear as a burgeoning guitarist and Bolles as a remarkable drummer, Vess said the Germs onstage “weren't all that good.”)
Unfortunately, the rapid-fire camera work used in filming the club scenes conveys a visual, but not a visceral, sense of the live shows' edginess.
And though the movie graphically depicts Crash's hellbent drug habit – lighters heating spoons and needles piercing flesh are common – it generally gives short shrift to the ugly underbelly and moral erosion of heroin addiction. But it finally does show, with no shellacking, the ultimate price paid by the late Mr. Crash.
Too often, however, “What We Do ” rests on ambiguity, as when it hints at Crash's homosexual leanings or casts the singer/ranter in a sympathetic light even when depicting his worse traits. (He taunts fans, belittles friends and band mates, incites vandalistic behavior and constantly demands beer.)
And everything the impulsive Crash does is treated like high art – even when he picks up a glass shard and cuts his own flesh onstage. Contrast that with the slurring, abrasive Germs frontman portrayed in the well-grounded 1981 documentary “The Decline of Western Civilization.”
Though “What We Do ” makes much of Crash's obsession with circularity – the Germs' logo; his fixation on letting people in or casting them from the band's inner circle; the “Germs burn” he inflicts with a cigarette on band mate Doom (Bijou Phillips) – his life was not round, but jagged. In its attempt to show otherwise, the film glosses over the grit, oversimplifying the jumbled talent that was Darby Crash.
