'What We Do Is Secret': Contagious In a Bad Way

Given the recent onslaught of punk-era biopics and documentary exhumations of such influential characters as Joe Strummer, Kurt Cobain, and Ian Curtis, it's inevitable that filmmakers would have to start poking further down in the pickle barrel of popular culture to find suitably mythic figures to celebrate. Even so, making a dramatic film about Darby Crash, the lead singer of 1970s Los Angeles punk band the Germs, is an odd choice.

True, Crash had all the elements, including an assumed name of Dickensian flair; a major-league drug habit; a feverish personality; a band whose shows were, during a brief moment of glory, the cause for unpredictable mayhem, and an allegedly premeditated mythic exit, at age 22, via an overdose of heroin. But for all of that, the Germs might as well have imploded in their own vacuum. It's groups like X, Black Flag, and the Minutemen that middle-age former scenesters rhapsodize about. The Germs, regarded as Los Angeles's first punk act, remain a weird footnote: Pop singer Belinda Carlisle was in their circle before starting up the Go-Go's, and guitarist Pat Smear later ended up playing with Nirvana and the Foo Fighters.

If there's a story here worth telling, "What We Do Is Secret," which opens Friday at Landmark's Sunshine Cinema, fails to discover it. Novice director Rodger Grossman, working from a screenplay co-written with Crash's close friend, Michelle Baer Ghaffari, has assembled a paint-by-numbers saga of sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, and more drugs that could apply to almost any band of the era. The template is a bit "Sid and Nancy" (without the Nancy) crossed with pseudo-documentary-style footage of the group's rise and fall, as the self-possessed high school troublemaker Darby (né Paul Beahm) rechristens his bandmates with punk names such as Lorna Doom and Dottie Danger (Ms. Carlisle), forces them all onstage before they can even play, and espouses oddball philosophical theories about the meaning of the band's blue circle logo.

Shane West ("E.R."), the actor who plays Crash, acts as if he's enjoying his James Dean moment, but is more reminiscent of a frat boy who decided to stick a safety pin in his ear. Hopefully, he's more convincing "playing" Crash on the road, where he's been performing in a reunited Germs lineup. The cast, which includes Bijou Phillips (as the bassist, Ms. Doom) as its only other name talent, is blithely amateurish. The dialogue is corny and pre-digested, like an after-school special in which the intervention fails.

For all its seemingly rampant squalor, "What We Do Is Secret" has a bizarrely bland tone. It's anything but punk. Yet it also lacks any deeper framing devices that could supply a psychological or emotional context for the story, which surely had to be richer and stranger than what's shown on screen. There's a significant homosexual subtext that goes almost totally unexplored, as does any element of anything that exists outside of the band's gigs, rehearsals, and chow sessions at the Oki Dog drive-in, a fabled Los Angeles eatery of dubious nutritional value.

There may yet be a worse movie than "What We Do Is Secret" released this year. But it's going to be tough to beat its unique and rare awfulness.