'The Runaways' Review By 'Film News'

Kristen Stewart stars in a lively 1970s biopic about the all-girl American band. By Peter Bradshaw

The time passes; the seasons turn, summer turns to autumn and now Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart are playing rock chicks. And doing it pretty convincingly, what’s more – Stewart, at any rate. This is the interestingly low-key, unhappy story of the Runaways, the 70s all-girl band led by blonde singer Cherie Currie (Fanning), with Joan Jett (Stewart) providing lead guitar and rock’n'roll attitude. With her clump of black hair, leather jacket and high-waisted, flat-fronted blue denims, Kirsten Stewart has an eerie resemblance to Jett and when, in one scene, she takes her top off facing away from the camera, her back looks as broad and muscular as a weightlifter’s.

In 1975, Jett finds herself hanging out at the English Disco in Los Angeles, where the kids are getting into David Bowie and glam rock and getting off on Do You Wanna Touch Me. Maybe period drama is now the only acceptable context for remembering Gary Glitter. Here Jett meets the bullying, mercurial record producer Kim Fowley, played by Michael Shannon, a bizarre figure who combines dandyish hair and fluttering mannerisms with boorish, bullying heterosexuality. He likes the idea of a girl band, and seeing Cherie hanging out by the bar, recruits her solely on the basis of her moody Bardot chops. Soon he is pitilessly drilling the band and getting local guys to throw beer cans at them, just to toughen them up.

The film, from Italian music video director Floria Sigismondi, interestingly shows how the aggressive girl-band both grew out of the English androgynous rock scene and was a reaction against it. Fowley sometimes affects to be irritated by these limp, fey mascara’d limeys, demanding that the Runaways show some balls. Yet it was the pioneering gender-bending glam-rockers who somehow created the circumstances for an in-your-face female rock band, making an incursion into the macho rock’n'roll world.

Art Linson is the co-producer of this engaging, small-scale film; he is the author of the Hollywood memoir What Just Happened? (later filmed with Robert De Niro) in which he recounts the agony of seeing much-cherished projects getting buried or neglected by the studio: one of these was Sunset Strip (2000), his 1970s rock movie which died a box office death.

Maybe The Runaways is Linson’s way of showing that he can make a success of this subject, and I think he has done, with a film which shows how brutal and sexist rock’n'roll is. There are some cliches (drugs on tour, montage showing the band climbing up the charts) and perhaps Fanning looks a little fragile, but the film interestingly and sympathetically shows the human cost to Jett and Currie, who could never quite be sure if they had reached the promised land of stardom or not.

Rating: 3/5


Filmnews