Stewart moves just like Joan Jett; she holds her guitar in that primal, nearly obscene way; she inhabits defiance while shrugging off her surroundings. Stewart is an instinctive actress who deserves a big career, and for fans of hers who are left cold by the Twilight phenomenon, The Runaways is a mighty relief.
WARNING: MINOR SPOILERS
The Runaways had a typical teenage dream: they wanted to be rock stars. But unlike most restless adolescents with that vague hunger, they actually came close to superstardom. That's not a story you hear every day, especially not when the musicians are female and the music is an aggressive jumble of glam, punk, and straight-ahead rock.
The rise and fall of this pioneering all-girl band is a tale worth telling, but the film The Runaways isn't quite up to the task: it misses opportunities for fun and reduces heartfelt dreams to hackneyed drama. Luckily, Kristen Stewart is more than able to fill in the gaps and remind us why we love rock 'n' roll.
The Runaways depicts the formation, first tour and subsequent unraveling of the band. To writer/director Floria Sigismondi, "band" really means guitarist Joan Jett (Stewart) and lead singer Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) — guitarist Lita Ford (Scout Taylor-Compton) and drummer Sandy West (Stella Maeve) are minor characters, while bassist Robin (Alia Shawkat) is entirely fictional. Most group scenes, including rehearsals and concerts, are brief and focus more on each girl's interactions with controlling, crazed manager Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon) than on internal band dynamics.
Maybe the lack of focus on the band as a whole shouldn't be a surprise — after all, the screenplay is based on Cherie Currie's memoir Neon Angel: The Cherie Currie Story — but you'll be forgiven for expecting a broader view from a film that has the band's name as its title.
Instead, it's all Currie from the opening scene, and startlingly so — the first shots are a visual "cherry bomb," in the form of drops of Cherie Currie's menstrual blood falling to the ground. Cherie's not prepared for the sudden onset of womanhood, and it's the first event in a passive/reactive pattern that emerges as the film progresses. She doesn't make things happen; life happens to her.
Currie doesn't even seek out the Runaways, though she does love music (especially David Bowie). The band's (male) manager Kim Fowley finds Currie in a club (Rodney Bingenheimer's ramshackle and historic English Disco, a fudging of facts but a nice nod to '70s glam culture). Cherie has just the Brigitte Bardot–esque look the band needs, at least according to Fowley. But as Kim promises to make her a star, Cherie just waits and stares. Her genre is more girl bland than girl band.
The real rock stars are Joan Jett and Sandy West. They approach Kim Fowley independently, eager to jam and write songs. Unlike Currie, they don't worry about their families or any other part of life outside of rehearsals and concerts: the band is family, and they're never more alive than when they're on stage. At least, that's what we think we know about Jett and West: viewers have to fill in a lot of details.
The Runaways is writer/director Sigismondi's first feature film, and her immaturity shows. She's a music video director who prefers gauzy spinning and unfocused gazes to direct storytelling and revelatory emoting. Even the music takes a back seat to style — although Runaways songs play in the background throughout, the actual performances are cut short or are blurred into a trippy haze.
Sigismondi is so concerned with the look of the band, she forgets to explore the sound of it. Most rock biopics revel in the music-making process, but we get mere glimpses of it. The longest glimpse comes when Kim Fowley and Joan Jett write "Cherry Bomb" on the fly for Cherie at her first rehearsal.
Even if you already knew that Fowley was involved, the scene is still a letdown — nobody wants to be reminded that a man (and a horny, half-insane man at that) co-wrote the song that would become a riot grrrl anthem. It should be fun and thrilling to witness the process, but it mostly feels uncomfortable.
There's plenty of comfort and creativity elsewhere, though, in the form of Joan Jett. Kristen Stewart channels Jett thoroughly and very sexily (all that studying paid off). Her detached, observant brand of cool is a master class in How to Be a Rock Star. We first see her shopping for her trademark leather and denim — in the men's section of a clothing store. She pays for her new duds with a pile of change, then swaggers out into the street to meet a friend:
Joan Jett: Who am I?
Friend: Elvis.
Joan Jett: No, I'm the glycerine queen. Suzi Quatro. I'm a f---in' wild one!
The female friend later plants a kiss on the wild one, and Joan just smiles cryptically, never reacting, always ultra-cool and mysterious. Stewart moves just like Joan Jett; she holds her guitar in that primal, nearly obscene way; she inhabits defiance while shrugging off her surroundings. Stewart is an instinctive actress who deserves a big career, and for fans of hers who are left cold by the Twilight phenomenon, The Runaways is a mighty relief.
Unfortunately, Jett has no backstory in the film. Whether that's because this is Currie's memoir or because Jett, as one of the film's producers, decided to keep her own secrets, it's a disappointment. And yet we end up knowing more about Joan than we do about Currie, simply because Joan knows who she is (and so does Stewart): a rock star, pure and simple. She faces the same challenges as Currie, but finds ways to deflect them or use them.
In a brief guitar lesson scene (one that made me momentarily fantasize about a completely different version of Sooner or Later), Joan's teacher tells her that "girls don't play electric guitars." Her response is to wordlessly plug in her ax and shred. Obstacles serve as fuel and help her focus on what matters.
Currie, on the other hand, wilts in the face of adversity. To be fair, Currie does start out with a yen for music and fame that rivals Jett's. But Dakota Fanning doesn't have sufficient stature (physical or otherwise) to give life to Currie's ambitions. Fanning lacks bravado and sass, and her voice doesn't even approximate Cherie's real-life brassy bellow.
In an early scene, Currie takes the stage at her high school talent show, her face made up like Bowie's on the cover of Aladdin Sane. As she lip-synchs to "Lady Grinning Soul," the multiple layers of gender-bending are almost too much to process — especially for Currie's classmates. Like Jett's triumph at the clothing store, the scene provides a lesson in badassery: when they boo you, just flip them off. But Fanning doesn't seem to enjoy the rebellion as much as Stewart does, so it quickly fades — and doesn't really show its lightning-bolt, androgynous face again.
Fanning's dull expressions and weak voice don't even begin to clue you in to the mysteries of her character. In fact, for once I found myself wanting a little more tell to go along with show, which is as much the writer/director's fault as the actress's. We can see that Cherie has a complicated relationship with her twin sister, alcoholic father and gadabout mother (Tatum O'Neal, in an odd cameo), but we can't really see what those relationships mean to her. And it's obvious that Cherie can't quite commit to the band, but without an emotional foundation, her reluctance just seems like juvenile fussing.
Combine all that inexplicable moping with the constant vibe of a Behind the Music downward spiral, and there's that pretty little picture of passivity again. Empty characters simply aren't compelling — they may be perfect vessels for a gimmicky all-girl act, but they don't have half the heft required to keep a film afloat.
If you can get past the deficiencies of story and character — and the profligacy of trite music-video style — The Runaways has a few interesting things to offer. The menstrual imagery at the beginning is emblematic of the film's feminism: here is an earthy, vital girl power that won't be ignored. Even when Currie's submissive nature subjects her to exploitation, these are girls who are trying to figure out who they are and struggling to stay true to what they discover.
I'm certain that the 13-year-old version of me would have been captivated by the feminist aspects of the film (especially when Kristen Stewart dons that red leather jumpsuit, but that's another topic).
The male gaze does significantly undercut the movie's feminist leanings — it often seems like the camera is taking the position of misogynist manager Kim Fowley — but that's appropriate to the story of the Runaways. They fought oppression at every turn, and were marketed as jailbait rather than juvenile delinquents, so it's only fair that we should squirm the way they had to.
The real fault in this girl band's girl power (or the subjugation thereof) is that it is unexamined. It's not enough to have something to look at; the viewer needs something to think about. Without context and analysis, sexism isn't instructive: it's just sad. As Kim Fowley hisses, "This isn't about women's liberation; it's about women's libido."
And the libido is the other tantalizing tidbit that makes the film worth watching. Kristen Stewart's Joan Jett is always on the prowl, even while she hangs back. In a saucy scene with drummer Sandy (who takes a shower while Joan hovers just outside the curtain), Joan encourages Sandy's adoration of Farrah Fawcett, all the while fighting off her own instinct to pounce. When she eventually does pounce — on Cherie Currie — she's smooth and irresistible, the personification of rock 'n' roll.
She embodies an elemental, omnivorous force that defies labels and explanation. Even when Joan is macking on guys rather than girls, she retains a queer sensibility: she stays strong, reserves the right to say no, is quintessentially butch.
The lesbian scenes in the film are surprisingly organic. In the documentary Edgeplay: A Film About the Runaways, Cherie Currie notes that same-sex encounters were more common and less freighted in the '70s, and that's how they come across in The Runaways: as natural curiosity or as expressions of freedom and revolution, not necessarily connected to identity but not out of character either. Unfortunately, Sigismondi's style eventually hems in the sexuality, blurring it and reducing it to suggestive sighs. But it's certainly better than nothing (and again, much better than Twilight).
Ultimately, writer/director Sigismondi missed an opportunity with The Runaways. It could have been a study in contrasts: passive, girly Currie versus aggressive, boyish Jett; Jett's Converse shoes and Sex Pistols T-shirt versus Currie's platforms and Bowie makeup; and on the radio, the lull of easy listening versus the rawness of three-chord Ramones-style rock.
Instead of succumbing to clichés like the series of headlines blaring the band's success, Sigismondi could have crafted a rapid-fire flip book of '70s pop culture and personality, drawing on the energy of all those great Runaways and Jett songs on the soundtrack — without relying on them to breathe life into limp tropes.
Moreover, here was a chance to tell the story of a girl band — the whole band. But Sandy West disappears soon after the naughty shower scene, and Lita Ford doesn't really show up until the last 20 minutes of the film. In the latter case, that may be because Lita herself declined to participate, but it still seems like a waste of pure rock energy.
Meanwhile, Alia Shawkat (Maeby on Arrested Development) must wonder why she agreed to do the film. Her character speaks approximately six words and is barely within view during the concert scenes. Despite that marginal presence, Shawkat recently summed up the movie perfectly:
...we were all just staying in a very specific style more than telling the authentic story of a young girl in the '70s. It's all about the music and then the drugs and we break up and that kind of thing.
Shawkat's character is supposed to be a mix of Jackie Fox and the other bassists in the Runaways' lineup (including Micki/Michael Steele, later of the Bangles), mostly because (according to Shawkat) Jackie and her lawyers wanted no part of the film. So Sigismondi is not entirely to blame for backgrounding parts of the band. Still, couldn't the fictional bassist — and the very real soloist, "Kiss Me Deadly" Lita — get a few more lines?
The failure to focus on the band didn't have to result in a less satisfying story — films like The Rose and Crazy Heart prove that a fascinating star can eclipse the band, the fans and everyone else — but as Shawkat suggests, Currie's tale is more like an after-school special than an artist's look back. We end up wishing for more of Joan's story, or more music, or more anything — just less emptiness, less passivity. More fun
And maybe that's really what's missing in The Runaways: a sense of fun. Shots of 1970s artifacts — muscle cars, pay phones, wood paneling and more feathered hair than you can shake a bright pink hip-pocket comb at — provide a little fizz, but they give way to the murk of drug-addled and alcohol-fueled doom. I don't mean to make light of Currie's struggles with addiction, but does every scene of an altered state have to be so heavy and gloomy? Presumably it was fun for at least a little while, but we're denied the joy of the highs that precipitated the depths.
At the end of the movie, the rocker and the victim briefly reunite, via a phone call from Cherie to a radio station where Joan is the guest. Currie notes that she's turned out reasonably well because she's "not dead or in jail," and there's the rub: hers is a story told in absences, in what didn't happen. It's a failure by way of not showing up, while Joan and the rest were there, waiting, ready to storm the gates.
Fans of Jett won't be disappointed in The Runaways — at least not while Stewart is on the screen — but as Joan and Cherie smile over the phone and "Crimson and Clover" plays over the credits, the final image is one of a missed connection rather than a love connection; a chance at stardom that defaulted into drug abuse and conflict.
The Runaways will, at least briefly, get the music of the band (and of the forever awesome Joan Jett) back into American teenage consciousness, and that's no small feat. We've all heard about "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll," but we haven't heard about them from a young woman's perspective, and that's the other essential element that makes the film worthwhile.
If you find yourself dissatisfied after seeing this movie, grab a guitar or the Joan Jett and the Blackhearts Live! DVD. The pure sex appeal of Joan Jett is really all about the music, and The Runaways forgets that. But the film might, as a side effect of its inability to live up to its subject, serve as a reminder to put another dime in the jukebox, baby.
The Runaways opens in limited release on March 19, nationwide on April 9.
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