On Screen

Poor Rodger Grossman. He spent 15 years trying to make his first
feature film, a biopic about punk-rock suicide god Darby Crash and his
band the Germs. The result is an accurate, reverent, lukewarm
nothing.

It’s not like Crash wants for documentation. The Germs were a
fireball carnival and Crash was their Barnum: a literate, intelligent
heroin addict and closeted gay. He elevated punk to a kind of
gutter-glam pageantry. If David Bowie was the superego of 1970s rock
‘n’ roll, Crash was its id. He slashed himself with broken bottles,
threw sugar and goop onto the crowd (which regularly attacked him), and
got himself banned from nearly every club in Los Angeles.

Just before and after his legendary death—an intentional
heroin overdose, as part of a suicide pact, the day before John Lennon
was murdered—Crash became a point of fascination for
documentaries (The Decline of Western Civilization), novels
(What We Do Is Secret, no relation), and biographies (Lexicon
Devil). So what does Grossman add to the pile? Not much.
Secret is a simple, just-the-facts narrative that borders on
hokey: band forms, band fights with selves and others (sample quote:
“Do you guys have to destroy everything?” “Yeah!”), heroin
happens, Crash dies.

Grossman stacked his production crew with old Germs and vintage
scene queens for accuracy control, which was the wrong impulse. The
world doesn’t need another gritty, authentic Crash hagiography. (Note
to the world: Unless you’re a reporter or a historian, striving for
authenticity is played. Fuck authenticity, whether you’re
writing a novel or starting an Indian restaurant. We don’t need
authentic, we need imaginative and good.)

You know who should make the next Germs movie? Julie Taymor and
Sofia Coppola, as producer and director. It should be as over the top
as Crash’s imagination, four hours long and filmed in IMAX, with
cameras zooming into Crash’s self-mutilated chest and through his veins
Fantastic Voyage style, and extended opium dreams, and animated
passages from Crash’s favorite books like Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Dianetics.

That would be worth 15 years.