Spreading Germs

by Shaun Brady

Recommended

Rodger Grossman's Germs biopic is by turns electrifyingly ragged, naïvely enthusiastic and endearingly shabby — much like its subject. The brainchild of self-mythologizing singer Darby Crash, the Germs burst onto the L.A. punk scene in the late 1970s with a beyond-raw sound (in their first incarnation, only guitarist Pat Smear really knew how to play his instrument) and became a legendary live act, not least for Crash's penchant for goading audiences into violent hysterics.

What We Do Is Secret is told in a combination of narrative and faux-doc pieces, which becomes something of a patchwork, with the talking-head segments a jarring shift from the gritty punk milieu. Shane West essentially became a method actor in reverse through his role, being tapped by the surviving Germs to fill in for their late frontman for a reunion tour. He plays Crash as charismatic but lost. The film is most effective in capturing the voracious appetite of the rock scene, with Crash accelerating punk's violence and just as quickly being surpassed by the growing hardcore movement, left behind and dead by the age of 22.

While Crash's life follows the standard biopic arc, Grossman plays down Behind the Music dramatics in favor of an adoring portrait of an artist masterminding his own demise. Claims of his being "the Jim Morrison of his generation" are certainly grandiose (not to mention a dubious distinction at best), but Crash's raw-nerve stage presence and the barbed-wire edges of the band's music are aptly communicated.

There is a whiff of defensiveness about the film, a sense that Grossman and Smear are staking their claim for the Germs' overlooked importance. At times this results in an overearnest awkwardness, but it's a tone not entirely out of place with the depiction of Crash as an immature dreamer with a need to conjure his own celebrity.

What fails to come through, however, is a sense of the context for these claims. We keep being told how important the Germs are/were, but what we're shown is spectacle — a gradual, dramatic, nightly self-immolation. It's irreconcilable in the film, but it's also long been the contradiction of the Germs, a band whose fans were more interested in seeing Darby bleed than sing, and whose detractors couldn't see past the stunts to the music. But while more renowned contemporaries, from the Ramones to the Sex Pistols, have entered the realm of harmless pop music, the Germs' recordings still bare their fangs.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

What We Do Is Secret

Directed by Rodger Grossman

A Vision Films release