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Review

Over the course of a few short years, Darby Crash and his band, The Germs, terrified Los Angeles’s nightclub owners, provoked their audiences, wrestled with vices, released a landmark album and burned red hot - until burning out. Crash’s 1980 suicide from a heroin overdose assured that The Germs became the stuff of legend, inspiring legions of followers from G.G. Allin to Nirvana. First-time director Rodger Grossman captures their legacy in this unique biopic that mixes dramatized interviews, live performances and vignettes of the artistic and personal struggles between Crash, his band, his boyfriend and his scene. The film owes as much to the sensationalized histories of VH1's "Behind the Music" as it does to the malevolent vision of L.A. seen in Gregg Araki films like The Doom Generation and Nowhere. A young cast — including Bijou Phillips as bassist Lorna Doom and "ER"'s Shane West as Crash — fits well into both modes (while serving as the film’s musical consultant, Germs guitarist Pat Smear actually recruited West to front a brief reunion tour) and conveys the staggering isolation of outsiders who are too dangerous even for outsider culture.

 -- John Vettese