The Runaways

As far as music biopics go, the world was hardly demanding a film about seminal girl-rock band the Runaways. It's easy to look back on the band now and see how ahead of their time they were, or to recognise the importance of what they did in terms of musical history, but they just haven't had that much of an immediate impact on popular culture. To most people Joan Jett is just an 80s rock chick and a one-hit-wonder (I Love Rock n Roll). This doesn't mean The Runaways can't be a great film - there are lots of unknown true stories out there waiting to become great movies. However, biopics are essentially about actors uncannily recreating very famous figures or amazing too-bizarre-to-be-true stories. The Runaways isn't really either of these things, so it falls short of greatness as a result.



Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) is a sexually ambiguous proto-punk rocker who, inspired by Suzi Quatro, dreams of playing electric guitar in an all-girl rock band. She meets Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon), a self-styled glam rock guru who sees the marketable potential in such an idea and helps Joan put together such a band. Into the mix comes Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), an awkward love-starved waif who dreams of being David Bowie. Despite an apparent lack of talent, Cherie is recruited as the band's singer and she leaves her family and her woes behind to go on tour (literally.... her alcoholic father is passed out on the lawn when the band comes to pick her up).



Kristen Stewart apparently had a longstanding ambition to play Joan Jett on the screen... as such she slouches and surls her way through the film in an assortment of denim wear and tight T-shirts, straddling the line between bi-curious and outright lesbian. Beyond this (admittedly accurate) piece of casting, it's hard to see why else this film should've been made. Whilst suitably doe-eyed enough to play the jailbait vocalist, Fanning doesn't really have the presence to play the ego sequences or Cherie's disappearance into a haze of drugs and adulation in the second half of the film. Michael Shannon steals scenes galore as Kim Fowley, but it's not really his movie.



At the heart of The Runaways is the idea that the two protagonists are freaks in their time - apeing the British glam rock movement and idols like Bowie and Quatro in a midwestern American suburban landscape of indifference. This rebellion rears it's head in the ideas of girl power and the positive sexualisation of females in a male-dominated industry... ironically, these girls turn out to be tougher than the androgynous male rock n roll acts of the time. There's also a little bit of stuff about the antagonistic relationship the Runaways have with the male rock n roll heirarchy but it's only really brushed on in the scene where Status Quo are rude to them and Jett responds by pissing on their guitars.



It's an entertaining enough film for music fans but overall it just isn't a satisfying experience. Much like the band itself, The Runaways has a lot of promise but just sort of peters out.



DIRECTOR: Floria Sigismondi

WRITER/SOURCE: Floria Sigismondi, based on the book by Cherie Curie.

KEY ACTORS: Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning, Michael Shannon, Tatum O'Neal, Alia Shawkat



RELATED TEXTS:

- The memoir Neon Angel by Cherie Curie, about her time in the Runaways.

- Edgeplay, a documentary about the Runaways directed by the band's former bassist Victory Tischler-Blue.

- For a better (but entirely fictional) film about rock music in the 1970s, just watch Almost Famous.