I freely admit that I don't really know a fucking thing about West Coast punk. But even I know that Darby Crash, legendary frontman for The Germs, deserves a better memorial than the tremendously straightforward What We Do Is Secret, even if it was created with the support of some of Crash's friends and bandmates. This film is Biopic 101 stuff: sloppily imply a broken home, run away from the subject's homosexuality, showcase his tragically sexy drug use, and assume that anybody who's watching knows enough about his life that you don't have to explain things that would be better off with the explanation.

Without doubt, Crash's life is worthy of the biopic treatment: born Jan Paul Beahm, he decided in 1975, at the age of 17, to take a cue from David Bowie's "Five Years" and concoct a five-year plan to turn himself into an immortal legend: with his friend Georg Ruthenberg (AKA Pat Smear), he founded a group based on the notion that it was better to present an attitude and then develop the skills to back it up rather than the other way around, and developed an essentially fictitious life and personality to attract as much attention as quickly as possible. Mouthing pro-fascist sympathies and writing songs of raw teenage anger and apocalyptic poetics, The Germs and Crash quickly became better known as the band so destructive that no LA club would book them. Meanwhile, Beahm had so successfully created a persona that his real self was left to wither: he started performing onstage while strung out on heroin to hide away from the violence of his chosen life. Crash/Beahm seemed destined for a quick burnout, and it turned out that his five-year plan called for exactly that; he committed suicide by heroin overdose on December 7, 1980, less than 24 hours before John Lennon was murdered, stealing Crash's spotlight.

It's not so hard to imagine a painfully deep and probing film about this subject, but it's also not very hard to imagine one that's shallow in almost every respect; and this latter film is what we get in What We Do Is Secret. The problem, really, is that it's a film for fans, by fans; you see figures like "10 years" and "15 years" tossed around for how long it took director/co-writer Rodger Grossman to get the film produced, and it feels absolutely like a labor of love. Except that as with so many labors of love, Grossman never quite got around to thinking about any audience made up of people who weren't exactly like him. As a result, What We Do Is Secret feels tremendously unfocused, with a narrative pitched at people who already know exactly where it's going. Darby Crash is a fascinating individual, whose motivations and willful destruction of anything like his real self ought to have been tremendous raw meat for the film to gnaw on, but Grossman's script (co-developed with Crash's real-life acquaintance Michelle Baer Ghaffari) doesn't provide any deeper insights into the subject's character than: a) he misread Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (and to be honest, I'm not even sure that we're supposed to realise that his reading of Nietzsche is so weak); b) if he'd been more comfortable with being gay, he might have found love and been saved. Meanwhile, those of us who don't really know much about Crash and The Germs have to take it on faith that the group was as important as the movie insists; other than some tossed-off lines about a couple of other groups, a Bowie poster, and the clumsy introduction of Penelope Spheeris's The Decline of Western Civilization, the film makes no effort whatsoever to suggest that there's a world outside Crash's prefabrications. We never really learn what The Germs are reacting to, we never really learn what they influence, and in the end, if you weren't already a believer, you're not going to leave with any kind of appreciation for the band's art.

If I were inclined to generosity, I might suggest that Grossman is slyly indicating how hollow Crash's existence was by making a film that's just as hollow; but I am not and have never been that generous. It's virtually impossible not to compare this film to last year's Control, the story of Ian Curtis's life and suicide as the tremendously influential frontman of Joy Division. Like What We Do Is Secret, Control never more than hints at why the band is important; in that film, it was because the focus was on how Curtis quickly got out of his element, how he never learned to think of himself as "Ian Curtis of Joy Division." In the Germs film? I dunno. Darby Crash may have been essentially unknowable, but I'd have preferred a film that demonstrated his unknowability, rather than just stating flatly, "Unknowable!" and launched into congratulating everybody who was a Germs fan in 1979 for being so fucking prescient.

So, all that said, onto what's good with the film: and that can be summed-up in the words "Shane West". I don't suppose anybody expected much out of West, whose pockmarked career includes Dracula 2000 and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and is highlighted by a three-year stint on ER, but damned if he hasn't knocked one out of the park here. He doesn't have much to play, it is true, but insofar as the film's vision of Darby Crash is at all convincing, it's West who does the heavy lifting; at any rate, he's good enough that after the film's 2007 premier on the festival circuit, the surviving members of The Germs agreed to reform to tour with the actor as their lead singer.

I guess it would also be worth praising the film's hectic, DIY-flavored style, which is undisciplined and frequently confusing (in a vague way, the film is presented as a mockumentary, but Grossman apparently forgets that for huge chunks at a time), but for a film about a band so anarchic as The Germs, I think this counts as a positive point. The form and content of What We Do Is Secret match up, and that counts for a lot in my book.

But past that, this is a totally unremarkable biopic comme une autre. It makes no case for its subject as remotely worthy of our time, and it says nothing of value about the human experience; it begins and ends with the filmmaker's guileless love for his protagonist, and while I commend Grossman for that love, it stands a unalloyed proof of why pet projects need to die in their cradle.

4/10