The Runaways Success

As teenagers in the '70s, Joan Jett and Cherie Currie were the girls who kicked in rock's door. But, as a new film reveals, there was a price to pay, writes Sia Michel.

The most striking thing about The Runaways, a new film about the trailblazing bad-girl rock band from the 1970s that spawned Joan Jett, is how authentic it feels. The clubs are properly scuzzy. The dialogue is properly raunchy. The actors can properly sing. The hair is fried and feathered, the skin spotty from weeks of running on little but potato chips and estrogen. From the adrenalin rush of performing to the monotony of rehearsal, it's a vivid snapshot of life on the road for ambitious teenagers who are constantly told that rock'n'roll "is the sport of men". (And that's their own manager talking.)

One reason may be that the movie is partly based on Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway, a newly revamped autobiography by the group's lead singer, Cherie Currie, whose chillingly quick self-destruction is relived through Dakota Fanning. Another may be that Currie and Jett (played by Kristen Stewart, see below) put the actors through hard-rock boot camp for several weeks before filming. And Floria Sigismondi, the writer and director, has "been around music all my life".

Along with making videos for artists such as David Bowie (Currie's musical hero) and the White Stripes, she's worked in clubs and gone on tour with her husband's band, the Living Things. "I wanted it all to look real. I wanted bed head. I wanted freckles and pimples," she says of the film, her first feature. The words she kept repeating on the set were "raw" and "gritty".

The rock lifestyle has been notoriously difficult to get right on film. The mainstream fantasy – sex, drugs, hard-core partying – usually trumps the more tedious reality of musicians striving for success but often becoming trapped by it. The result has been films that end up either bloated and cartoonish (see the American Indian shaman following Jim Morrison around in The Doors), sweetly sanitised (see the intercourse-avoiding groupies of Almost Famous) or as road-to-ruin predictable as Behind the Music. But since 2002, when the hyperactive 24 Hour Party People captured the music scene in '70s and '80s Manchester, there has been a trickle of rock biopics that get the milieu and the music just right, such as Control, the story of Joy Division, and What We Do Is Secret, the story of the Germs.

The Runaways is the rare movie to address the female rock experience. Until now the touchstone has been the fictional 1982 cult film Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, a look at three skunk-haired female punks who make proclamations such as: "Every girl should be given an electric guitar on her 16th birthday."

"It's very hard to make a film about popular musicians, or music as the subject in any context," says Jack White of the White Stripes. "You could trust Floria to find the right angle because she has no need to oversell the subject."

Sigismondi, 44, earned her first big buzz as a video director in 1997 after strapping Marilyn Manson into stilts and gruesome dental gear for the Beautiful People clip. She looks like a rock star herself, dressed in slim-fitting black pants and a black sweater, her long, slightly goth hair fanning over a furry caveman vest. Simultaneously cool and effervescent, she is easy to imagine directing arty musicians such as Bjork, Sigur Ros and Interpol as well as pop divas such as Christina Aguilera, which she did.

The biggest legend she has ever worked with is Bowie. The video for his 1997 song Little Wonder is a quick-cut barrage of eyeballs, eye patches and aliens. "Floria is a real force of nature, never short of ideas, and meticulous in the way she brings them into play," Bowie says. "She's also a little bit crazy, in a dark way, which in a working situation is just fine with me."

From Los Angeles, Sigismondi came to the project, made for less than $US10 million, after her manager introduced her to two of the producers, father and son Art and John Linson. (Art produced films such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Fight Club; John produced Lords of Dogtown, about '70s skateboarders.)

Both producers thought a female director was crucial. "We felt from the beginning that this is really a tale of two young girls [Currie and Jett] getting in way over their heads in a world they knew very little about, a man's world, and there's a price to pay for that," he says. "We thought: 'It's got to come from the heart of another woman.' "

The Runaways follows the general trajectory of the band though Sigismondi also considers the movie more of a coming-of-age story than a definitive biopic, focusing on the relationship among Currie, Jett and Kim Fowley, the band's insult-spewing male manager (Michael Shannon). In the film Currie struggles with her twin sister, a sick alcoholic father, addiction and instant notoriety. Above all, Sigismondi says, she is a young girl trying to define herself in a high-pressure world of excess, with little adult guidance.

"It's a cautionary tale on Cherie's side and an inspirational tale on Joan's side," she says. (After the Runaways broke up in 1979, Jett had a No. 1 hit with a 1982 cover of the Arrows' I Love Rock'n'Roll.)

Fanning says the anarchic world the Runaways inhabited drew her to the role of Cherie Currie. "Working in the film industry, there are so many people in control, lots of authority and rules about so much, including school," she says. "And there the Runaways were with no rules at all, out on the road with no supervision, making it up as they go along."

The Runaways' classic hit from their four-year career is the 1976 jailbait anthem Cherry Bomb; the quintet's combative sexuality – surprising for rock at the time – seemed to both alienate and titillate audiences. They were talented musicians who helped write their songs and were ferocious live yet they were often written off as a slutty, manufactured novelty act by the dude-dominated '70s rock press and heckled by male musicians, even those they appeared with. (Creem magazine infamously dismissed them with: "These bitches suck.")

"The attitude was that women couldn't rock'n'roll," says Currie, who joined the band when she was 15. "We were a real threat, especially being teenagers."

In a typical scene in the movie, Jett, the rhythm guitarist and a singer, and Sandy West (Stella Maeve), the drummer, are mocked by two craggy-faced longhairs during a sound check at the kind of club where pipes threaten to fall from the ceiling. "One day you'll be opening for us," the girls say, ready to fight. "Opening your legs, maybe," the men sneer. To get revenge, Joan sneaks into the guys' dressing room and urinates on a guitar.

Writing the script, Sigismondi was thorough, interviewing Jett, Currie and members of her family, along with Fowley.

The producers didn't immediately imagine Fanning as Currie, who sleeps with Jett (while wearing roller skates) and snorts cocaine in a plane bathroom. After all, she was only about 12 at the time and was best known for playing plucky yet innocent characters in films such as Uptown Girls and The Cat in the Hat. But in the years it took to get the film financed, "she literally grew up during that time," Art Linson says. "It was pure luck that it took that long, because she's spectacular."

After the actors were signed, rock school began. They took lessons in their characters' instruments, so they knew how to hold and wield them correctly, and Fanning and Stewart trained to sing exactly like the women they were portraying. "The first time I heard a tape of Kristen singing I Love Playing with Fire I thought it was me," Jett says. "I sent it back and said, 'You've got to send me a new mix with Kristen higher up, because I just hear me.' And someone finally said, 'Joan, that is Kristen.' She had nailed all of my inflections to such a degree that I couldn't tell."

Sigismondi was exacting about period authenticity, too, trying hard to avoid what she called the kitschy '70s Brady Bunch effect. "I wanted to tone it down a bit," she says, and make it look a "little bit dirty". Instead of shooting digitally, Sigismondi opted for Super 16 film, which has a grainy, more retro texture.

It would have been easy to go over the top with the Runaways, given their stranger-than-fiction back story. But the filmmakers were relatively restrained. Look at what was left out: in Currie's memoir, she is raped at 15 and later impregnated by a much older crew member; some of the girls are arrested in Britain and assailed by a flying knife at a club.

Currie hopes the film will bring a reconsideration of the Runaways' legacy. ("When I saw Madonna in a corset for the first time, I was like, 'Hey, I did that first,' " she says.) The band's pioneering status is often underplayed in music histories, even though Jett, a platinum-selling rocker with the Blackhearts in the '80s, went on to become a feminist symbol, embraced by the "riot grrrl" movement of the 1990s. Lita Ford, the lead guitarist, became the rare female heavy-metal shredder.

And after forays into acting in films, substance-abuse counselling and other endeavours, Currie may have the most appropriate post-Runaways career of all: she is a chainsaw artist, carving sculptures out of wood. "It's just me, a chain saw and a log," she says. "And no one's telling me what to do."

The New York Times

The Runaways screens at the Sydney Film Festival on June 9 and 12, sff.org.au. It opens in cinemas on July 15.



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