As a devotee of the early punk rock scene, I was really looking forward to seeing this biopic of Darby Crash and the Germs. The Germs weren’t my favorite of the West Coast punk bands, but they definitely helped lay the groundwork. Unfortunately, they also helped lay the groundwork for the LA skinhead scene, which is, IMO, the worst legacy of that era of punk music. They tried to address that in the movie, but it came off as an incredibly superficial larding.
But holy shit, was this movie ever cheesy. It actually contains the line, “He [Darby] is brilliant! He’s the Jim Morrison of OUR generation.”
Fuck. You.
This movie is way too slick and smiley. There’s no grit to it. It’s a movie with a bunch of pretty actors that don’t know shit about punk.
And holy shit. I paused the last 20 or so minutes of the movie for a while, because I was so disgusted with it.
I just watched the last bit, and HOW THE FUCK DID THEY MISS THE MOST POIGNANT MOMENT OF CRASH’S LIFE?!
SPOILER
They showed his OD in a fair amount of superficial detail, but they DID NOT put in his tragically incomplete self-written epitaph, “Here Lies Darby Crash.” The fact that he tried to memorialize himself, but was not able to finish before he died is the perfect metaphor of his entire life, especially in light of his death being utterly overshadowed by that of John Lennon.God, what a fuckup of a movie.