What We Do Is Secret

Who? Well quite, and that may well be the problem for any casual movie fan who happens to like musical bio-pictures. Jan Paul Beahm during his short run for fame was better known as Darby Crash, lead singer and founding member of Los Angeles punk band The Germs. Firmly picking up on the punk ethic for doing it yourself, Crash and his band made waves across L.A. for a short period of time. Much like The Sex Pistols back in the UK, The Germs were blighted by being unable to play venues as their reputation preceded them. With Crash growing ever more erratic as he tried to execute the various strands of his so called 5 year plan, those around him invariably suffered. Here director Rodger Grossman attempts to tell the "true" story of the life and death of an enigmatic young man on a "crash" course to oblivion.

With low production values and a choppy attempt at being a semi rockumentary, What We Do Is secret is really only of interest to fans of the band or those wishing to bone up on American punk rock circa 1976-1980. Even tho myself, an ageing old British punker, quite liked The Germs, this film only exists because of two major factors. For the facts are that outside of L.A. they were hardly known at the time. It's only because of Crash's subsequent suicide at a young age {on the day John Lennon was shot and killed} and guitarist Pat Smear's future involvement with Nirvana and the Foo Fighters, that the band have had a reappraisal. With minimal input cut onto disc, one has to wonder if someone is trying to build up a legend that doesn't actually exist? What can be said with confidence is that the film at least brings the L.A. punk scene to notice. With all the historical talk about the New York punk scene that was born out of CBGB'S and Max's Kansas City, it often gets forgotten that L.A. had its moments too.

The cast here are pretty much the run of the mill performers one expects from such a production. Ranging from adequate (Shane West as Crash) to very decent (Rick Gonzalez of Coach Carter fame as Smear), Grossman's film will not be remembered for any great thesping. And since Crash is not very likable, or engaging on an intellectual level, the finale is unlikely to strike you with a sadness born out of the waste of a young life. However, the soundtrack crackles with punk vibrancy and emotive potency, and definitely some of the concert sequences have the look and feel of the original punk rock era. But ultimately the piece remains only worth an interest to an undemanding and small selection of music fans. Oh and 70s fashion guru's as well one thinks. 5.5/10

The ascension of The Germs was more of a local buzz of fans obsessed with seeing a self-fatal maniac cut himself on stage and snarl into a cheap mic. I used to be a huge Germs fan, not so much any longer, nevertheless, The film follows Darby's persistent nihilistic struggles as he moves forward with The Germs. I was terrified that this would be a simple boring chronicle with a fade to black at the end with a little blurb about what they're doing now. But I was confronted with a film that bridged an interesting gap between documentary and narrative film. The acting is suburb and the film is easy to watch and mostly accurate, which is surprising! Most 'punk' films are obsessed with a hard and fast sound track filled with the heavy hitting punk bands. This one however sticks mostly with Germs tunes, but fills the void with Bowie (one of Darby's favs) and some fear (they're playing at a club). The film-makers made excellent choices to keep the sound track in a supporting role and let Darby really take the lead, just as his did in the band.

Darby, for me, always summed up the punk world view, which is really angry nihilism (talk about irony)and I think this conflict is what he is ultimately struggling against, and also the reason that Punk as a 'movement' is self-defeating. Darby, as a character, is deep. And is artfully played. In the end, I suppose he would have made Nietzsche proud, Darby the anti-hero, the result of aspiring to the role of Übermensch. He found however, the bleak truth behind that famous graffiti, God is dead ~Nietzsche, Nietzsche is dead ~God.

This movie was great, both to inform people who care to learn, and people who are already interested in the subject and punks in general. I read a comment in here that said this movie was too "clean" and that punks were "scum and proud". If this is a reason to dislike this movie then you obviously are not seeing things how you're supposed to. The whole mind set of punks is being themselves and being individual because they feel that's what is right. In their minds they're not doing anything wrong; in their minds, they were the ones who were truly clean, where as the high and mighty assholes of society living their fake lives were the ones who were scum and proud. This film is through the viewpoint of the punks, to better relate to them. Keep that in mind when watching this film, it isn't like every other punk movie spat out by the media to show how outrageous and unethical punk is, whoring it like it's some kind of circus act, if you're looking for that in a punk movie, you're missing the point and should steer clear of this film.

Last year there was an accomplished little film called Control by Anton Corbijn starring Samantha Morton, Sam Riley, Alexandra Maria Lara, et al., with beautiful black and white images of England evoking the short life of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, an English rock group of the 80's. This is the same thing, only the singer and the group, "legendary" and "seminal" though they may be among followers of punk, are less remembered among music fans, and the extent of the legend hardly becomes clear in this version. The focus is a lead singer who runs a group called The Germs. The film-making, which mixes dramatized sequences with fake documentary interviews, seeks to evoke the LA punk scene of the late 70's and early 80's. The scene and the film are sloppier, the concert sequences are more violent and less musical, the characters are less defined, and the ending is sudden. Yet in the opinion of some fans, it's not violent or sloppy enough, and one can see their point.

The lead singer in question, played by the successful TV actor Shane West, is a professed Fascist, though anarchy seems more his style, who takes on the name Darby Crash. He has been expelled from a special high school whose teachers proclaim him ungovernable but brilliant. He gives other band members names like Lorna Doom (Bijou Phillips) and Pat Smear (Rick Gonzalez). Gonzales has wonderful cheekbones, but never seems like a punker. Darby tells a French interviewer that he has a five-year plan--indication of his ambition but also a hint that his days are intentionally numbered. He's giving himself that long to make it big; perhaps also that long to live? So it went, anyway. At some point he seems to have said to the band they'd be as big as the Beatles. Ironically, he offed himself the night John Lennon was shot. In a late sequence Darby's cohorts mourn Lennon as they watch reports on TV of his death, while the scene cuts back and forth to their lead singer, alone with a girl groupie pledged to go out with him, deliberately overdosing.

This movie may awaken nostalgia or longing in those who wish life were crazier than it is now. The LA punk scene was a time of true mayhem, which is conveyed here even if the styles and interactions don't always quite fit the period. The group is assembled haphazardly including two girls recruited on the basis that they should have no talent and not be able to play an instrument. The Germs began to play without knowledge of the rudiments of music or their axes and their energy grew out of the outrage of the audience, which itself seemed more in search of violence and anger than art from the stage. This was a time of "joke bands," set up with some gimmick, like a male lead singer wearing a dress, and wailing laments that were not taken seriously by the band. The Germs were more serious, insofar as their leader cut himself and bled in public. The aim was to risk everything, and The Germs got banned from one music venue after another. At one point they stage a comeback by changing their name to "GI," for "Germs Incognito." They have trouble finding a drummer and run through nine. The one who sticks is a guy from Arizona who calls himself Don Bolles (Noah Segan). Segan has a wide-eyed eagerness and energy that, faute de mieux, has to pass for Bolles' personality. A homosexual relationship seems to develop between a certain Robby Henley (Ashton Holmes), who hero-worships Darby, but maybe he just wants to be in the band. Later he replaces Bolles as drummer through a violent misunderstanding. A woman called Amber (Missy Doty) becomes manager, over someone else, by virtue of paying for Darby's and the others' drinks and drugs.

Briefly Penelope Spheeris becomes a character, shown working with a big movie camera on her film, The Decline of Western Civilization--a reminder that this is a scene that has been well documented. This is a fictionalized recreation, with documentary touches. In that respect more than Control it resembles Fulton and Pepe's 2005 Brothers of the Head, which cunningly presents multiple forms of fake footage for an invented Siamese twin punk band. But both of those deserve higher ratings than What We Do Is Secret, though some may value the raw crudity of the concert sequences here, rarely recreated with such ferocity.

The movie is less successful, indeed makes little effort, at showing how The Germs interacted with and influenced, or were influenced by, other punk bands of the time; and in detailing the personalities involved; or specific songs. Datelines indicate times and venues of main Germs concerts, and the making of an album is briefly sketched in. But concerts are represented by one partial, ill-defined song each. Contrast Control where some concerts get extended sequences, and songs come through to even an uninformed viewer. Here, the atmosphere outside of violent clashes between people, boasting by Darby, and the in-your-face nosh pit concert scenes, is not really that punk. The clothes and manners could be any beatnik hippie depressed young folk of the last fifty years, and the effort to define a moment through a key group and voice is a failure.

It's simply this: Shane West, as a singer and performer of Germs songs as Darby Crash in What We Do is Secret, works fine. In the 1/4 of the film where the filmmakers turned their attention to the on-stage performances for the film (or one-time album recording), West does very good work, so good in fact one may be tempted to revisit just those aggressive and loud and messy and amazingly crude songs when the film is broadcast on a loop on IFC (you know it will be). And yet, for all of West's feracity in the part as the singer, when he has to *act* as Darby Crash, it's at best halfway believable and at worst very stupid.

There is a resemblance, somewhere, between West- who previously appeared in such films as, yes, A Walk to Remember- and the grimy and death-by-junk singer who had a real intelligence and some crazy ideas. But at the same time West also looks and sounds and sometimes emotes just like what he is: a good but definite pretty boy. Darby Crash was many things, but a pretty boy assuredly not. And because the writing means to try its damndest to put a lot of the emotional weight on Crash, many moments (though not all) with West as Crash fall flat. Thankfully, by the third act, he isn't as irksome, and it almost turns into a halfway decent portrayal of such a true cult figure (cult in the literal sense perhaps).

And yet I can't put all blame on West, or even for the other competent-to-good-to-not-so-good supporting actors playing other members of the Germs. It's the first-time writer/director Rodger Grossman, who hasn't quite figured out at times how to be very confident with the camera, and at best is most daring (in somewhat predictable ways) during the musical sequences and perhaps one shot where a pool is reflected. The rest is a lot of rote work as far as the dramatic stuff goes - when it comes to the "iterviews" done with the people in the band, the groupies, the b-word "manager/girlfriend/mother" of Darby Crash, they fare much better. Indeed if Grossman had been more decisive with how to take the direction of the film (as a documentary done with actors filling in the parts and going through actual things they may or may not have said), it would have worked better either way as gritty bio-pic or bittersweet pseudo-documentary.

I probably sound harder on this movie than the actual vote/rating would say. Maybe it's because as a big fan of The Germs I was slightly more forgiving than other people may be. For the uninitiated it definitely gives a precisely strange and f***-ed up idea of who Crash was and how he drifted into heroin. And as well the uninitiated will find that it stinks. It's for die-hards only.