What We Do Is Secret Film review

Posted on 01. Aug, 2008 by Administrator in Film/TV

by Bill Dvorak

Watching first time director Rodger Grossman’s labor of love, the punk rock biopic What We Do Is Secret, is sort of like staring into the empty, glazed eyes of its junkie protagonist—you know there’s something there, but you’ll be damned if you can find it.

Although it succeeds magnificently in re-creating the spit, vomit and neon-lit seed of the Los Angeles punk scene circa 1979, What We Do is Secret falls short of achieving much else.

The film focuses on the Germs’ troubled frontman and gifted lyricist, punk icon Darby Crash. Although the Germs only released one full-length album, 1979’s GI, they were one of the first L.A. punk bands and pioneered the “faster-is-better” sound that eventually became American hardcore. As the visionary behind the band, Crash essentially engineered their ascent to punk rock stardom with his “five year plan,” which involved finding the right mix of musical incompetents for his band, handing out their punk rock monikers (Lorna Doom, Pat Smear), getting signed, finding fame, and ending it all with a Sid Vicious-inspired suicide. Crash’s plan was more or less successful but, in an ironic twist, he fatally overdosed the day before John Lennon was shot, and news of his death took a back seat to Lennon’s. Tragic, but perhaps a fittingly ironic demise for a musician whose career was marked by missed opportunity.

While What We Do is Secret honors its subject matter with amazing attention to detail (the actors look just like their real-life counterparts) and emphasis on Crash’s intellectual ideas, it falls short in several areas. The acting is flat, the dialogue can be painfully contrived (“You know I want this Darby, I’ve always wanted this.”), and Grossman does little to inspire a connection to Crash and his band in those viewers who aren’t already familiar with the Germs. The live performances come off well, and Grossman uses them as an interesting narrative device to highlight or foreshadow events (Crash destroying his own reflection in a mirror), but the rest of the film is mired in teen-angst cliché and amateurish film-making. Shane West—known as Dr. Ray on ER—looks and feels like Crash when sneering and cutting himself on-stage. Off-stage, in the scenes that require him to take on the dynamic persona that was Crash, he becomes the same piece of lifeless cardboard that was propped up next to Mandy Moore in the teen romance A Walk to Remember. The other actors fair no better: they frequently deliver their lines as if they were reading them for the first time from cue cards.

It’s not that Grossman doesn’t care about the subject matter—it’s clear from his use of Crash’s writings as voice-overs that he understood him—but the film often feels so personal that it’s hard to become invested in it, and the myriad problems with the acting and direction don’t help. Not unlike Crash, What We Do Is Secret suffers the same fate—it’s ambitious and has a clear-cut agenda (to do Crash, his band, and that long-lost punk scene cinematic justice), but it misses the mark by tripping over its own shortcomings.

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