New "the runaways" still

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Source: TwilighterNews

In the appropriately rank alley behind a small Los Angeles club called the Smell, Cherie Currie, former lead singer of the '70s all-girl band the Runaways, yells out to ingénue-of-the-moment Kristen Stewart, standing a few feet away. Currie could easily be referring to the actress' body temperature: The midday July weather is sweltering, and Stewart, dressed head-to-toe in black leather for the role of Currie's onetime bandmate Joan Jett in The Runaways, is wiping sweat from her forehead. Stewart is on a smoke break; beside her, Dakota Fanning, who plays Currie in the movie, munches on a veggie doodle. While two Twilight fans linger near a Dumpster down the block, hoping to glimpse the franchise's stars, the paparazzi -- who have hounded the production all month, much to writer-director Floria Sigismondi's frustration -- are absent on this, the second-to-last day of the shoot.

Currie is actually talking about how good Stewart looks as Jett, and indeed she does. Minutes before, Jett, also an executive producer, chatted privately with Stewart, their heads bowed, each with a raised hand grasping a chainlink fence, looking almost identical in all but age. (Also, the 51-year-old Jett's 'do is shorter than her 19-year-old doppelgänger's era-accurate shag.) As Stewart gets ready to go back inside, she smiles awkwardly and says simply, "So was Joan."

Millions of people probably know that Stewart cut and dyed her hair black last year, which is far more than can name a single Runaways song. (Neither Stewart nor Fanning had even heard of the ban before being cast.) The Runaways were five teenage girls writing and performing aggressive, sexually defiant rock music during a time when all of their peers were older and few were female.

Yet the band's importance remains canonical rather than commercial. Though the self-proclaimed "queens of noise" could "actually play," as reviews at the time noted with surprise and mor than a trace of skepticism, the Runaways never sold the records here (their biggest album, their self-titled debut, moved 25,000 copies) that they did in Japan. They recorded four albums in four years and yielded only one enduring single, the teasing, debutante-debasing "Cherry Bomb," on which a 15-year-old Currie promises, "I'll give ya something to live for / Have ya, grab ya, till you're sore."

Figuring the Runaways were ripe for rediscovery, seven years ago Jett's manager, Kenny Laguna, began shopping around an idea for a script based on a revised, more explicit edition of Currie's 1989 autobiography, Neon Angel (out this month to coincide with the film), at one point tapping an as-yet-unmasked JT LeRoy to write it. "I thought it was important to define history," says Laguna. "If they did a movie about the Go-Go's or the Bangles, then they would be remembered as the band that broke down the barriers."