Please for the love of your own personal god or gods, don't go see What We Do is Secret, the bio pic on the short, purposely tragic life of Germs singer Darby Crash. I saw it Sunday at the Ritz in Philly and was soul-sucked by the half-baked massacre of actor Shane West's (of ER shittiness) portrayal of Crash. The Germs only have meant much to me in my later years as a jaded old fuck trying to rewrite my record collection--I wasn't cool enough to have heard of them when I was a teenager. I was too busy thinking I had explored the entire world of "PUNK" with fashionable English bands like Generation X, The Sex Pistols, and the Clash, or even worse, bad U.K. hardcore like the Exploited or G.B.H.

Anyway, I won't wax punkly poetic about the Germs—Darby Crash did enough of that himself when he still held breath in his lungs. I could give gushy descriptions of his cult of personal nihilism and the like, but I won't. It would serve me only as a clodhopping hindsighter who latches on and puts more gravity on things like, for example, a band that never even really left L.A. Anyway, I like the band, a lot, no big whoop.

So it goes without saying, I would have mild expectations for any film that would take on such subject matter, but this pseudo-documentary of Crash's life plays like one of the weaker ABC After School Specials (they should have gotten one of the Jonas Brothers to star in the film). I exaggerate not, you never get any sense of the preciosity of Crash's worldview nor do you get any inkling of the most sub-atomic whiff of authentic show performance or even merely a single psychotically driven gesture. It is, unequivocally, the least earnest attempt at a rock bio ever filmed. Give me Gary Busse as Buddy Holly or Lou Diamond Phillips as Richie Valens or even Prince as Prince over this festering mound of far-flung celluloid crap balls.

What We Do is Secret never fastens together a single piece of a truly believable, remotely potent band-like moment and the guy who plays Pat Smear could be an Asberger-inclined, Hispanic Pauly Shore. To call this feature length chuff powder something as diplomatic as "scrappy" would be like saying a special Olympic shot putter should win a Noble Prize for his enthusiastic drooling. This is a movie of fake vomit and rubber needles, and if you're a fan of that, then you'll probably pants-splittingly adore this wank stain of a distressingly disingenuous and entirely misrepresented flashpoint in West Coast punk rock.

I still can't decide what is more painful, the dramatic recreations or the fake 20/20-style interview footage. It all makes a VH1 Behind the Music appear to be properly presented Shakespeare in-the-round. Jesus Christ, did Roger Grossman (the filmmaker) never see The Decline of Western Civilization? My friend Henry and I walked out on Garden State when that pile of donkey doo played in the theater at an Atlanta multi-mega-plex, and I still occasionally do skip out on a movie that has an unavoidably lame trajectory, but, for some childish hope, I kept watching What We Do Is Secret to its repulsive, amateurish, ham-fistedly inevitable conclusion. Trying to tie in the pathos of John Lennon's assassination, the film ends with Smear watching the news broadcast of the killing when he receives the call about Crash's suicide. As I left the theater, I just kept thinking to myself how lucky Lennon was to escape life without ever seeing this film.