This week in local theaters

WHAT WE DO IS SECRET In my day, you had to visit a dozen Blockbusters to find a ratty copy of The Decline of Western Civilization. Now, the story of Darby Crash and the Germs has been pruned into the same formulaic Great Man narrative you'd expect to see applied to, say, Babe Ruth. Crash, the frontman of one of SoCal's more enduring punk acts, was a self-immolating, conflicted queer in a scene whose attitude toward the gay stuff was ambivalent at best. In his book Enter Naomi, author Joe Carducci was clearly talking about the Germs clique when he wrote that Hollywood rock's tone "was set by show-biz pedophiles grabbing after faghags-in-denial chasing reluctant homosexuals back into the closet"—an analysis about a zillion times smarter than Secret's treatment. Combining the stereotypes of a hundred indie coming-out dramas with an insight into intra-band politics worthy of a VH1 pundit, first-time writer/director Rodger Grossman's version of the Germs' story, with Crash played by Shane West, sounds almost verbatim like the far superior 2002 oral history Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs. The worst kind of bastard adaptation, Secret subtracts without adding: What's not on-screen is the covert thrill of teenage self-invention that kept Germs armbands circulating on a generation of weird kids, despite media indifference and cultural amnesia—and much of the reason that Crash's story bears telling. —Nick Pinkerton (Opens Friday at The Belcourt)

DARK DAYS In this haunting, moving and in many ways miraculous 2000 documentary, director Marc Singer goes beneath the streets of Manhattan to create a one-of-a-kind portrait of underground America. Singer's subject is a community of homeless people living in a shantytown in the subway tunnels under New York's Penn Station—a world of bone-chilling cold and constant darkness. The dwellers in this secret city build shacks of scrap wood, shave using broken mirrors and give shelter to pets thrown away above ground. Some are addicts, some have mental disorders; some dine on the enormous rats that vie for subsistence down below. All find value in the things others have discarded—an idea that resonates on personal, metaphorical, even spiritual levels. First-time filmmaker Singer, a British emigrant, started the film when he was 21 and spent five years assembling it. For part of that time he lived in the tunnels, and his subjects doubled as his crew, tapping into power lines for juice and helping him shoot, light and record the film. Somewhat impractically, Singer eschewed digital camerawork and shot on black-and-white 16mm film—a decision that cost thousands more in credit card debt, but paid off immeasurably in the movie's unforgettable ghostly look. Aided by the delicate but indefatigable rhythms of DJ Shadow's score, this is nothing less than illuminating. —Jim Ridley (Screens Sept. 24-25 at The Belcourt as part of "From Tramp to Vagabond: A History of Homelessness in Film")

FROZEN RIVER If Melissa Leo were Charlize Theron with artfully applied bags under the eyes, an Oscar nomination would surely be forthcoming for her terrifically truculent turn as Ray, a single mother of two boys who reluctantly teams up with an equally struggling American Indian, Lila (Misty Upham), to smuggle illegal immigrants across the U.S.-Canada border. Like many first features that began life as shorts and were shot over two weeks with a Varicam, Frozen River can be ragged viewing. First-time director Courtney Hunt has astute visual command of the dreary landscape that frames these women's struggle to survive, but her abundant use of thin ice as metaphor and slathered-on pathos made me wince, and the movie careens uncertainly between gritty realism, sudden bursts of melodrama, and inspiration. Too many bad things happen, then too many good things, and I took bets with myself on the precise arrival time of the flowering of female solidarity between these two tigresses risking all for their cubs. That Ray's automaton hardness has its limits goes without saying, or Frozen River would never have been picked up by Sony Pictures Classics. But what sticks in memory is the unnerving lack of basic safety that comes with living on the financial edge, and being forced to take untenable risks. —Ella Taylor (Opens Friday at Green Hills)

GHOST TOWN It takes a good while for Ricky Gervais to warm up in Ghost Town; it takes even longer for the audience to warm to Ricky Gervais. During the opening minutes of the film—an occasionally effective mash-up of Ghost, The Sixth Sense and The Frighteners—Gervais, as Bertram Pincus, D.D.S., is nearly mute as a dentist who enjoys his work because it allows him the peace and quiet that comes with sticking cotton balls into his patients' mouths. But following a brief period of death on an operating table, he sees dead people. And the dead, of course, bring Bertram to life, especially Greg Kinnear's tuxedoed Frank, offed while shouting down the realtor who revealed his affair. Frank latches onto Bertram in the desperate hope that the sullen dentist can bust up his widow's (Tea Leoni) remarriage. Director and co-writer David Koepp, more or less remaking his 1999 film Stir of Echoes with a romantic-comedy's dopey grin this time, does little to break with the genre's conventions. But Ghost Town, dead on arrival throughout much of its first half, picks up as it slows down—when it ditches the decidedly dreary romantic slapshtick of the living and focuses, however briefly, on the needy, aching dead. —Robert Wilonsky (Opens Friday)