The Runaways

The Runaways are an all-girl band in a boys-only rock n' roll world in "The Runaways."

(Floria Sigismondi, 2010)

April 11, 2010
by Joel Crary
“The Runaways” opens with the image of menstrual blood smacking against pavement. Keep that shot in mind as you’re watching the film. Everything it suggests is echoed in each scene that follows. When the Runaways hit it big, the world was still trying to figure out how to absorb an all-girl group of pissed off rockers taught to swagger, pose and come on like men. That they were mere teenagers still uncertain of heir own sexuality makes their story all the more unsettling.
“Girls don’t play electric guitar.” That’s what Joan Jett’s (Kristen Stewart) music teacher said before trying to lead her through another verse of “On Top of Old Smokey.” Her response was to plug her guitar into an amp and strum C to D to G as loudly as she could. Jett would spend time after school at a nightclub listening to the DJ spin “Rebel Rebel” and Gary Glitter. One night she spotted producer Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon), who acted not at all surprised that Joan had heard of him. She’d already had the notion to form an all-girl rock band. Fowley happened to know a girl drummer.
The Runaways were up and running, but they needed something. Fowley taps a photo of Brigitte Bardot, right in the crotch. He convinces 15-year-old Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) to visit the band in their trailer park practice space, where she comes prepared to sing the most saccharine Suzi Quatro song imaginable. Fowley and Jett have different ideas. Before the day is out, Cherie Currie, who only recently got her first period, is howling lyrics about orgasms in a song called “Cherry Bomb.” “This isn’t about women’s lib, kitties,” Fowley shouts from the sidelines, “It’s about women’s libido.”
The band toured, got signed, and hit it big. They were sold as a threatening yet intriguing force of masculine feminism in a climate of glam androgyny. Writer/director Floria Sigismondi is fascinated by what it must have meant for the first all-girl pop rock band to gain attention and fall prey to the unavoidable exploitation attached to their fame. One of the great ironies of the punk rock movement is that the rebellion it championed as a way of life to millions of teenagers was as pre-packaged as the “girl power” sloganeering of the Spice Girls in the late 1990s. There is great tension between Jett, who wants to focus on the band’s music and artistic integrity, and Currie, who is too young to see the harm in having provocative photos taken to advertise the Runaways as “jailbait.”
The film focuses on Jett and Currie’s relationship, their whirlwind introduction to the world of drugs, sex and booze, the perils involved with their mounting fame and Currie’s resulting estrangement from her family. All of it is backed by an avalanche of period punk songs. Sigismondi, a music video director who has worked with the likes of Bowie and Marilyn Manson, knows precisely how to light and apply focus to her scenes, letting each reveal information that docudrama dialogue might have turned into formula. Consider a shot of Joan throwing gear around the studio as Fowley eggs her on from the control room like a sadist taunting a caged animal. Shots like these bring forward the film’s themes with the force of a freight train.
These are great performances. Michael Shannon, who earned every scrap of his Academy Award nomination for his supporting work in “Revolutionary Road,” here plays Fowley with a perverse intensity. He’s the kind of guy who appears somewhat in style and yet completely removed from it in the hopes that he will accidentally pioneer the next big thing. Dakota Fanning offers a brave, wounded portrayal in Cherie Currie. At barely 16, Fanning has accepted roles that have provided her with experiences a lot of people twice her age haven’t ever dealt with. Here’s to hoping she keeps her head.
As for Kristen Stewart, her Joan Jett is a nuanced tribute, a display of finely honed mannerisms and vocal delivery. There was a trailer for “Twilight: Eclipse” preceding “The Runaways.” Stewart’s role as Bella in those films seems to require her to do little more than look depressed and sleepy. Those who condemn the actress on the grounds of “Twilight” would do well to check their prejudices at the door. As the young Jett, her glower is laced with coke-fueled anger and a passion for songwriting, all wrapped up in a homemade Sex Pistols t-shirt and thrift-store leather jacket.
Some have complained that “The Runaways” is too lacking in factual detail (bassist Jackie Fox denied the producers the right to portray her in the film). It’s not the facts that make the film interesting, but the fever. It plays like a nightmarish inversion of “A Hard Day’s Night,” right down to the gender reversal. Women have long been used in the media to promote unseemly agendas; rock n’ roll was just another opportunity for the Kim Fowleys of this culture to ride a wave of sex, violence and revolt to profit. Jett, Currie and the rest of the Runaways may have vindicated their aims through chants of self-empowerment, but they were having their strings pulled the whole time.
The Runaways perform “Cherry Bomb” in Japan:
source 
~Robstenfan