Anton Sirius' The Runaways review (2010, directed by Floria Sigismondi)
Depending on who you talk to, the Runaways were either an interesting footnote in rock history, or one of the Most Important Band Ever. They certainly weren't the first chick rockers (Patti Smith and Suzi Quatro got there before they did) but they were the first all-girl band to actually make some legitimately awesome noise (despite being packaged as disposable sex kittens) and thus prove that girls could kick as much ass as boys. A biopic was pretty much inevitable; the only question was which generation of starlets would be the ones to portray them.
In the end, we got the Twilight generation. And that turns out not to be as tragic a bit of happenstance as it could have been.
As a movie, the Runaways is fairly bland, which is a weird thing to say about a film that begins with a drop of menstrual blood hitting the sidewalk. It makes no effort whatsoever to distance itself from all the usual rock biopic stereotypes. Drugs! Tyrannical managers! More drugs! Big success in Japan! Drugs again! Shattered home lives! Still more drugs! Partly that adherence to cliche is due to the source material. The movie, while produced by Joan Jett, is based on Cherie Currie's autobiography, and Currie apparently saw her life in terms of those cliches. Sigismondi's direction, in her feature debut, doesn't help either. She makes no effort to get to the other side of those cliches, just presenting them at face value rather than using them to reflect on Currie's choices, or contrasting how Currie was handling the ride to how any of the other band members were. Sigismondi frankly seems more interested in shooting a music video for Cherry Bomb (which she does, awkwardly shoehorning it into the Japanese tour sequence) than she is in making her characters three-dimensional.
Really, though, most of the blame needs to be pinned on Dakota Fanning. She's simply not up to the task at hand. It's fine that she doesn't come across as a terribly dynamic frontwomen for the band, since Currie wasn't a terribly dynamic frontwoman in real life, but what doesn't work is her doe-eyed distance from the proceedings. She's trying to play it guarded and damaged, but she just comes off as disinterested. Currie is supposed to be the fallen star, the one who burned out and couldn't handle the fame, who didn't trust that she deserved the success: the mirror image of Joan Jett's 'born to be a rock star' balls-to-the-wall determination and drive. Instead Fanning just alternates between being kinda nervous, and kinda sleepy, and never once seems to be giddy from the heights, or bracing for the (to her) inevitable lows.
And Fanning's weak effort is a crying shame, because Kristen Stewart is a revelation as Joan Jett. She absolutely fucking nails it. I'm sure it helped to have Jett herself on set for reference purposes, but that doesn't downgrade the bravado of the performance. From the moment she appears on screen she's a nuclear missile homing in on rock and roll stardom, who isn't going to let any motherfucker stand in her way. While Fanning has the showier role in Currie, Stewart's got the tougher assignment. Currie is living a cliche rock lifestyle because she doesn't know any better; Jett's living it to prove that she can, and because she knows she has to in order to get what she wants. The self-awareness, and self-assurance, in Stewart's performance is amazing, and completely unpredicted by anything I've seen her do before. It's a performance that to an extent even saves the film. With a lesser actress in the role, the Runaways would have been a total train wreck, as opposed to the merely OK movie that it is. I'll even go a step further. Kristen Stewart does a better job of channeling Joan Jett here than Joaquin Phoenix did of channeling Johnny Cash in Walk the Line. She's that damn good.
About the only thing I can think to compare Stewart's performance to is Joseph Gordon-Levitt's in Mysterious Skin. I had zero expectations for either of them heading into their respective movies, and came out the other end strongly suspecting that they might in fact be among the best actors of their generation. Gordon-Levitt's proved me right on that assumption since; I can only hope Stewart shakes Bella out of her hair and gets a chance to do likewise.
There isn't much to say about the rest of the movie, because there isn't much else to the rest of the movie. Michael Shannon isn't good at all as the band's svengali Kim Fowley. At no point do his profanity-laced tirades and mind games rise above the level of comic relief, and they really needed to have some actual menace behind them given how they were supposed to be contributing to the band's disintegration. The rest of the gals barely gets any screen time, which is weird considering that a) Lita Ford was the band's guitarist and it's not like she disappeared off the face of the earth after the Runaways broke up, and b) they went to the trouble ( of inventing a bassist for the band, cast Maeby from Arrested Development (Alia Shawkat) as said fictional bassist, and then gave her all of about three lines. I understand the thought process behind inventing a bassist, since in reality the Runaways blew through more bassists than Spinal Tap blew through drummers, but it just seems a wasted effort to go to all that trouble and not do anything with the character. Keir O'Donnell does deliver a fine Rodney Bingenheimer impression though, so that's something.
Basically put, the Runaways is just all right. Stewart's performance aside, it's nothing special. It isn't daring enough to be more than a formulaic rock biopic, but despite all the teenage drug use and the brief lesbian scene between Stewart and Fanning (c'mon, you knew it would be in there... did you really need me to tell you about it?) it also isn't entertainingly trashy enough to be a legendary Gaggle of Starlets flick. It may, in fact, be the exact midpoint between I'm Not There and Satisfaction.
If it ends up doing for Kristen Stewart what the band itself did for Joan Jett though -- make her realize what she wants and what she's good at, and helps her get there -- then it'll all have been worth it.
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review for the runaways - more praise for kristen
From its opening plop of menstrual blood on Southern California asphalt, The Runaways feints in the direction of being an obstreperously feminist biopic worthy of its subject, the mid-1970s hard-rock band of teenage girls—exploitatively promoted and covered as "real jailbait"—who shattered the sound barrier that kept all-female pop combos in the low-decibel or novelty ghettos. And for much of its first half, veteran music video director Floria Sigismondi's feature debut gives the story a buzzing, underdog energy, transcending the genre's well-worn basics due principally to a pair of nervy impersonations: Kristen Stewart as shag-coiffed, slouching guitar goddess Joan Jett, whose will and ambition can't be denied by a teacher's refusal to let her plug into an amp; and Michael Shannon's often hilarious and ultimately toxic manager-collaborator Kim Fowley, more a glam Beelzebub than Svengali in his studded choker, daubs of face paint, and Nietzschean lack of self-doubt. ("I'm gonna teach you to use your cocks!" is a typical Fowley sneer at his underage protégés in their filthy rehearsal trailer, before he invites some boys in to hurl beer cans at them for "heckler practice.")
Unfortunately, The Runaways isn't really about either of them, or musical alchemy. Hanging out at the same L.A. clubs as Joan is 15-year-old Cherie Currie (saucer-eyed Dakota Fanning, occasionally recalling Patricia Arquette-level catatonia), burdened by a messy home life and scorned with cries of "freak" at her school-assembly lip-sync of Bowie's "Lady Grinning Soul." (Fanning replicates Currie's "underwater" arm-waving brand of solo-dancing impeccably.) Before long, Fowley has recruited Cherie as the front-girl Bardot of the band, browbeating her to drop cooing Peggy Lee-style vocals for a coquettish snarl, imploring her to "sing like you want an orrrrrrrrrrgasm!" Sigismondi paints him as a bottom-line cretin vamping as a visionary, but her script endorses his goals, suggesting that his crass manipulations were the only means of translating the loud-girl-band idea into a major-label career. (The film does give him some creative props when he and Jett appear to improvise the group's signature tune "Cherry Bomb" in about two minutes, like an old MGM bio-musical's scene around a Tin Pan Alley piano. Yet it's a fun moment, not a ludicrous one: "Cherry Bomb" is plausibly a two-minute job.)
The time and place is vivid with a desaturated handsomeness, whether cinematographer Benoît Debie is filling Cherie's wood-paneled family home with harsh, unwelcome sunshine or staging the girls' nocturnal drinking session in the foreground of the floodlit, decaying Hollywood sign. But once the Runaways break through and fragile Cherie becomes a casualty of plentiful drugs and soft-porn photo spreads, Sigismondi's approach (and her adaptation of Currie's autobiography) tacks toward VH1 oh-the-scandal blandness, with generic hotel-lobby collapses, studio meltdowns, and finally a gauzy-lensed reconciliation with Cherie's loyal, loving sister (Riley Keough). Where the movie does stake out new ground is showing Joan and Cherie not only as partners in flushing their contraband down an airplane toilet, but falling into bed together on the road; at least this lack of timidity makes homo-skittish portraits of the '70s like Boogie Nights and Almost Famous look blinkered.
But the plot's focus on Currie rather than Jett is a serious imbalance, particularly given the magnetism gap between the two young actors' characterizations; Fanning's spacey waif can't carry much weight opposite Stewart's persuasive, working-class leather siren, who's capable of both confronting Fowley and teaching her drummer how to masturbate with a showerhead. Finally parted by the incompatibility of Joan's lifer noise-queen chops and Cherie's vulnerability, the two young women could've been the spine of a more daring, unconventional drama, but the film's closing minutes make the whole project primarily seem an origin story for Jett's long-lasting stardom. Its makers fail to connect the nascent musical group's fandom for Suzi Quatro or Ritchie Blackmore to the devotion they inspired in generations that followed them.
Source:
www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/the-ru
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