Review of The Runaways (2010) by J D — 01 Feb 2011

By Kevin Sturton for remotegoat on 01/09/10.

"Girls don't play electric" a guitar teacher tells Joan (Kristen Stewart). Joan is not best pleased about this. She wants to rock out like the boys do. She's got a leather jacket and she's changed her name to Joan Jett. All she needs is a band. A chance meeting with music producer Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon) brings her together with Sandy West (Stella Maeve) and Lita Ford (Scout Taylor-Compton) to form the all-girl band The Runaways. Fowley completes the set by bringing in schoolgirl Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) as lead singer and rechristening her Cherry Bomb.

The Runaways were one of the first all girl bands. They did not last long before imploding. Joan Jett and Lita Ford moved on and made a success of their solo careers but The Runaways were largely forgotten. This affecting biopic makes no great claims towards the band's importance beyond emphasising that these girls really could rock. Writer/director Floria Sigismondi instead focuses on the dynamics of the group and how these teenagers interact with each other and the demands placed upon them by the volatile Fowley.

Fowley verbally abused and pushed these young women to their limits, at one point hiring teenage boys to throw things at them as they performed so they could get used to playing while being heckled by a hostile crowd. The Runaways undoubtedly owed their success to him, but Fowley was also a destructive force. Cherie Currie was hired by Fowley because she was "Brigitte Bardot in a trailer park." When he organises a revealing photo-shoot for a magazine for his Cherry Bomb, Jett and Ford go nuts and The Runaways begin to tear themselves apart.

'The Runaways' presents the 70's as a grim environment with no real prospects for teenage girls. They are expected to know their place. Currie has a wayward mother (Tatum O Neal) who leaves her children to move abroad with her lover. Joan starts the film ambling around and dreaming of better things. Both want more than the world seems prepared to offer them. The Runaways provides them with a way out but proves to be a bruising learning experience, especially for the fragile Currie who descends into a drugged-out haze.

Photographer and music promo director Sigismondi provides an authentic feel to the band sequences. Jett was apparently insistent on a female director taking charge of 'The Runaways' and Sigismondi brings a clear-eyed view of the bonds and rivalries that develop between these young women. As a result 'The Runaways' works best as a coming of age tale and the ending is genuinely touching.

The performances of the three leads are outstanding. Kristin Stewart is ballsy and likable as the streetwise Joan Jett and proves she has far more range than the 'Twilight' movies allow her. Michael Shannon is mesmerising as the complicated Fowley, at once the driving force behind The Runaways and arguably their destroyer. Dakota Fanning is affecting as the weak Currie, who went from being the Bowie-loving outsider at school, to being the outsider in the band who earns a stinging rebuke from Lita Ford for daring to be lost in reverie to Don McLean's sentimental song 'Vincent.'.