'The Runaways' a Portrait of Good Girls Gone Wild

The first image an audience seated for a screening of The Runaways, the new movie about the rise and fall of Joan Jett’s first band, sees is the bloodied leg of a young girl who has just hit womanhood. As she and her sister scamper across a fast food parking lot to clean up and change from school girl clothes to more sexy fare, the viewer gets a clear picture. This is a movie about the early twinges of girl power, about the girls that came before 'The Bad Girls Club', about girls that know how to get down and dirty. But mostly, it’s a movie we’ve probably seen many times before.

Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie and Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett in 'The Runaways'.

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CREDITS

Genre: Drama
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning, Michael Shannon, Scout Taylor-Compton, Alia Shawkat
Director: Floria Sigismond
Screenwriter: Floria Sigismond
Producer: John Linson, William Pohlad, Benoît Debie
Studio: Apparition





Runtime: 1 hr 45 mins
Rated: PG-13
Synopsis: Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning star in this music-fueled story of the groundbreaking, all girl, teenage rock band of the 1970s: The Runaways. The film follows two friends, Joan Jett and Cherie Currie, as they rise from rebellious Southern California kids to rock stars of the now legendary group that paved the way for future generations of girl bands. Joan and Cherie fall under the Svengali-like influence of rock impresario Kim Fowley, played by Michael Shannon, who turns the group into an outrageous success and a family of misfits. With its tough-chick image and raw talent, the band quickly earns a name for itself—and so do its two leads: Joan is the band’s pure rock’ n’ roll heart, while Cherie, with her Bowie-Bardot looks, is the sex kitten. Written and directed by Floria Sigismondi, the film chronicles Joan and Cherie’s tumultuous relationship on and off stage, as the band starts to break out.

OUR RATING

The Runaways is the story of two very different girls—rocker-from-birth Joan Jett (mulleted Kristen Stewart) and David Bowie-loving sex kitten Cherie Currie (Farrah Fawcetted Dakota Fanning). While Joan dreams of breaking rock barriers to form the first hard rock girl group, Cherie is just a slightly wacky blonde who has just discovered her sexuality and doesn’t know what a weapon it is.

A matter of happenstance leads Joan to run into legendary rock kook Kim Fowley outside a Hollywood club and before you can say "underage," Fowley has hooked her up with an all-girl band with some serious edge. But the band needs a sex symbol and Fowley finds that in Currie. With only a little coaxing, The Runaways turn from teens practicing in a trailer to a fully functioning group on the rise. But with success comes the usual—sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. While Joan basks in the glory of the rock life, Cherie begins to become swallowed up by it and threatens to take the rest of the band with her.

Across the country, swarms of little girls wearing Team Edward t-shirts will be lining up to see the reunion of Twilight’s Bella and Jane. But The Runaways is no swoony teen drama. Instead, it’s a movie very clearly positioned as a coming-of-age vehicle for both Stewart and Fanning. Stewart, defiantly donning a mullet and sneer, manages to rid herself of Bella’s stuttering self-consciousness. As Jett, she prowls and swaggers and pees on the guitars of people she doesn’t like. She also has a preference for females, including a steamy scene with Cherie that is sure to be quite the hair-raising experience for more conservative members of the viewing audience. And she deserves an extra point or two for attempting to sport Jett’s trademark eighties shoulder pads and long mullet sans irony, even if it doesn’t quite work.

      While The Runaways were unique in being an all-female disaster, their story is really one-in-a-hundred. And because the band lasted for such a short time, the stories they do have to tell seem stretched thin trying to fill an hour and a half of reel.       

But regardless of what studio marketing teams will have you believe, Stewart is not really the focal point of this film. This is really the story of Cherie Currie, otherwise known as the movie where you’ll say, "When did Dakota Fanning grow up and why am I so uncomfortable with this?" Fanning makes it clear she is no longer the precocious child star of I Am Sam and War of the Worlds. She’s a bisexual sex kitten. She sniffs drugs off of dirty floors. She feathers her hair! She might as well have taped a sign to her back saying, "I’m officially a grown up." 

But the funny thing is, as clear a ploy as this role may be for Fanning, she makes it work. In Fanning’s hands, Currie is a clearly vulnerable child playing dress-up. Even when Currie reaches her most diva-esque heights, you feel for the girl thanks to the undercurrents of sadness in Fanning’s performance. In a mediocre movie, it’s clear that Fanning is only revving up for the roles she knows are yet to come.

While the other actors in the film, including Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road) as energetic and unabashedly dislikeable producer Kim Fowley, do their best to give the film some gravitas, The Runaways is mostly an unoriginal biopic with two really big names in it. From Sid and Nancy to Walk the Line to Ray, audiences have seen the fast rise and faster fall associated with rock stardom over and over again. While The Runaways were unique in being an all-female disaster, their story is really one-in-a-hundred. And because the band lasted for such a short time, the stories they do have to tell seem stretched thin trying to fill an hour and a half of reel.

Fans of Twilight may leave the theaters slightly scarred until the arrival of Eclipse undoes a bit of the damage. But surely Fanning and Stewart have accomplished their goal of announcing that they are no longer children to be pushed around. And if they got even one girl to put down their copy of "Twilight
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~Robstenfan