Director/writer: Floria Sigismondi
Camera: Benoit Debie
Editor: Richard Chew
Prod. Designer: Eugenio Caballero
Set Decorator: Beauchamp Hebb
Costume Designer: Carol Beadle
Cast: Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning, Michael Shannon, Scout Taylor Compton

The Bottom Line

There are uneasy patches in this film, particularly in the second half of the movie, when the music begins to play second-fiddle to the band members various crises with drugs, egos and personal rivalry. They slow the film down by paying too much attention the volatile personalities that start to unravel under the pressure of exhaustion and emotional confusion. It does not ruin the movie, it simply overbalances it, but when this movie is at it’s best – as it is in the first forty minutes -  it is sensational.

Kristen Stweart as Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie

  
Main Review.

The 1970s was a dazzling time of experimentation and innovation in pop music. Hard rock, glam rock, Heavy Metal, reggae and in the second half of the decade – disco music created new trends and new stars were emerging everywhere, seemingly overnight. Nowhere was this musical revolution more visible than in Los Angeles, especially in West Hollywood, where the bars and clubs became the testing ground for every new act. The old rigid styles and genres were crumbling in the face of heavy metal bands and the glam-rock androgyny of David Bowie and others.

In all that change and diversity it was unusual that up to that time, there had never been a successful female rock band. It was as if the thought of girl-rockers simply never occurred to anyone, but with the upsurge of feminist activism in the 1970s, it became a possibility. Two girls, still in their teens - guitarist Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart)and drummer Sandy West (Scout Taylor Compton) – and they subsequently found a singer Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) and took their act on the road.

Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett

They were not getting very far. At some venues they were pelted with beer cans and jeered off the stage but they teamed-up with an exploitative, relentless producer Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon). He was crude, foul-mouthed and relentless and he re-shaped the girls and their music into a tough, sexually-liberated, hard-edged bitch teens, who took on the male bands head-to-head, and to everyone’s surprise. They became a hit. Their something about these rock-chicks – the first of their breed – that chimed with the newly militant feminists, and the carefully costumes and produced “theme” bands.

The girls in the band were just teens, but they lived rough, drank hard, played even harder and experimented with all the permutations of sex and drugs that their milieu could offer. They were in a sense rigged for a swift burn-out, and that’s what happened. “The Runaways” scored big hits with songs "Cherry Bomb", "Queens of Noise", "Rock n Roll", "Neon Angels (On the Road to Ruin)", and "Born to Be Bad", but the career of the band was short, lasting from 1975 to 1979. Some them, like Joan Jett, went on to more stable career, but others, like Cherie Currie, crashed hard and this film tells the story of their tempestuous rise and fall. 

Director Flora Sigismondi

The film’s writer-director, Floria Sigismundi, insists that the film is not a conventional biopic. “I kind of didn’t want to do a documentary with a list of ‘and then they played here, then they got bigger, and this is what audiences thought of them’. For me it was more about how does it feel to be in the skin of a young girl in this experimental time. The 70’s were very experimental”. That part of the she gets exactly right, especially the casting.

The film’s best performance comes from Michael Shannon, the band’s relentless and manipulative manager. You may remember Shannon’s dazzling Oscar-nominated performance as the suicidally depressed man in "Revolutionary Road". His work as the band’s manager Kim Fowley in “The Runaways” is of the same exceptional calibre. He explodes onto the screen: brutal, foul-mouthed and relentless but also successful. Even though he was ostensibly managing the band, it was always and only about him. He’s a rock -’n – roll and when he’s ob screen the film is electrifying.

Michael Shannon

To b fair, the though, the wattage generated by Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning is also pretty dazzling. They had worked together before on both the second and third “Twilight”, this film shows the depth and range of their talent. The Dakota Fanning we saw in “I am Sam” and “Charlotte’s Web” has gone forever and the blonde sex-kitten we see belting out “Cherry Bomb” shows us that her career has scarcely begun. Ditto Kristen Stewart. She’s fine in those soulful, soft-porn vampire tales but she gets the feisty endurance and hard-core attitude of Joan Jett exactly right.

It’s worth noting that all the actresses in the film, including Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart, went through a gruelling boot-camp to make them look credible as singer and instrumentalists in a band. “I wanted it to be authentic and to look as if they really owned it” said director Sigismondi.  “Before shooting started, they had two weeks of band performances, all day and every day. I put them in front of live audiences, to show them how a real performance worked.  Dakota, as a singer, was competing with amps, drums, and there’s nothing subtle about singing against that. That physical kind of experience made the difference to her performance.”

Dakota Fanning and Michael Shannon

For at least half of the running time the film is authentic and exciting to watch. The sense of place and the vibe of the 1970s is superbly evoked and richly detailed. Their pile-driving rise to fame give us an adrenalin rush of rock-nostalgia, but the drugs and the egos, the overdoses and screaming fits are a cliché of the music business. “The Runaways”  started out as an inventive and original band, and unique trend-setter in it time,  but they close down like any third-rate scandal – rancorous fights, wounded pride, drug overdoses and vindictive malice feed the tabloids -  and once the tabloids move in with their jeering stories. The first half of the film is exciting and original. The second half of the film is exactly the opposite, but it is still pretty vivid and interesting.     

Other Voices

“Chicago Tribune”, Michael Phillips

A rich and surprisingly old-fashioned musical biopic, The Runaways has neither the bloat nor the blather of your average Hollywood treatment of stars on the rise.

“Salon.com,” Stephanie Zacharek

The best rock ’n’ roll movies are less about strict authenticity than about capturing a vibe. And The Runaways gets the vibe just right, from its opening shot.

“Village Voice”, Karina Longworth

In The Runaways’ first hour, there’s a guttural pleasure to be had in riding waves of rock-movie cliché spiked with socio-sexual commentary. The movie is at its best when working through the contradictions of teen sex-for-sale, when it’s both turn-on and creep-out.

“Philadelphia Inquirer”, Carrie Rickey

Despite Sigismondi’s fresh eye, feminist perspective, and rapport with actors, “The Runaways” feels like a long-form music video, recycling every trope from the doomed-rocker handbook