Jan Paul Beahm, who went by Paul before he became Bobby Pyn and, finally, Darby Crash, grew up in Los Angeles with a neglectful, alcoholic mother. As a boy, he read Nietzsche. Like Adolf Hitler.
As Darby Crash, he formed a band with his best friend from childhood. They advertised for a couple of “untalented girls” to join them. Eventually, he called the band the Germs, and for a while they soared and it was L.A. and punk was hot and maybe some of it was nihilistic and maybe some of it was just of the moment. All along, though, Darby had a five-year plan to form a band, become famous and … well, he’s vague about the ending in Rodger Grossman’s film, “What We Do Is Secret,” opening today at Bay Area theaters.
Shane West (”ER”), who is also one of the film’s executive producers, stars as Darby Crash, complete with a convincing dental prosthetic. He looks uncannily like the snaggle-toothed, baby-faced singer who is as well known today for the irony of his decision to end his life the day before John Lennon was killed as for his explosive flash of a career.
The film is structured, too predictably, like a faux documentary, featuring band mates and friends like Pat Smear (Rick Gonzalez), Lorna Doom (Bijou Phillips) and Amber (Missy Doty), the hanger-on who became the band’s self-anointed manager by virtue of her willingness to buy drugs and booze for Darby. Darby himself is a talking head, although filmed in black and white, because, you know, him being dead and all.
The commentary itself is often useful, but the film actually loses some of its credibility and momentum whenever an actor shows up to tell you things that could have been better conveyed through dramatization. The evidence for that is essentially the rest of the film, where we see Darby, first as a little kid reading Nietzsche, then deciding to form a band with people who couldn’t play any instruments. Their first gigs are pretty bad, even by amateur punk standards. But, little by little, through Darby’s drive and often brilliant songwriting, the Germs become the most important band in the L.A. punk scene and, in the years since Darby’s death, an influence on many other bands.
Darby’s five-year plan kept him on course for a while, but his inner demons couldn’t be quieted by anything, including the Germs’ success. There were drugs from the beginning, and, later on, there were more drugs. The film makes a kind of armchair-psychologist’s diagnosis of the reasons behind Darby’s self-destructive inclinations. There was his mother, emotionally absent from his life. There was an older brother who died of an overdose.
And there was sexual confusion as well. Just as the Germs were emerging at the top of the heap, Darby meets up with young Rob Henley (Ashton Holmes), a tousle-headed kid with bad acne who seems at first to be coming on to Darby. Darby responds, but whether he had a sexual relationship with Rob is left unclear in the film. What isn’t left to doubt is that Rob, like others, insinuated himself in the Germs’ retinue, and his hold over Darby extended to influencing decisions about the band. In short, he’s portrayed as the Yoko Ono of the Germs’ brief shining hour.
Grossman does a workmanlike job with the film, but his direction and script don’t really offer any great insight into Darby’s tortured soul. The performance scenes are competent as long as the camera is on the cast, with West’s Darby drawing a shard of glass across his naked chest, but the crowds all look like Hollywood extras. What the film is missing is a sense of the grit of the punk scene, the smoke, the jammed-together bodies, the ashen faces with hollow eyes and bad teeth. The film captures the sometimes posed anarchy of the early years of punk, but only fleetingly.
There’s a very funny scene where Darby misbehaves during a live radio interview with KROQ, uttering a few words that could have gotten the station’s license pulled, while the poor radio host tries in vain to control the unruly band members.
Some of the supporting performances, like those of Phillips and Gonzalez, are very strong, but it’s West who lifts the entire film to a whole other level. Yes, he looks like Darby, but his performance is a lot more than fake crooked teeth. West inhabits the character completely, adding multiple layers of insight and nuance that Grossman’s script only suggests.
So, on Dec. 8, 1980, Darby Crash stuck a needle in his arm and died. His death would have made headlines, it would have been one of those cultural milestones, were it not for the fact that the same day, John Lennon was shot to death outside the Dakota in New York City. It’s ironic, of course, because at the time, the coverage of Lennon’s death eclipsed the end of Darby Crash. Yet, today, that’s one of the reasons some people remember him. “What We Do Is Secret” reminds us that there are other reasons we should, and West gives those reasons an all-too-human face.
– Advisory: Crude language, sexual references and depictions of drug use.
E-mail David Wiegand at dwiegand@sfchronicle.com.
