Shannon, even with his formidable size and nonstop epithets, seems too lovably damaged. Maybe there's a three-hour cut of The Runaways down the line that will be more compelling.Īs Fowley, Michael Shannon looks scary and stops the show with his rants, but have you ever seen the real Fowley interviewed? His creepiness is otherworldly. The last part of the film is unfocused, with connective tissue missing. You get no sense of whether it altered the band's already volatile chemistry, or even what Jett and Currie made of it after the fact. Late in the film, Currie and Jett have a love scene, but it happens in a vacuum. Fowley isn't thinking female empowerment he's thinking "jailbait," barely pubescent girls acting dirty and available for an audience with as many people leering as rocking out.Īccording to the documentary Edgeplay, made by one-time Runaways member Vicky Tischler-Blue, the vibe among the bandmates was never very good - and director Sigismondi gives scant time to other members. The film's more lurid thread is Currie's debasement. The Jett character is mostly a bystander: She stands by as manager Fowley drills his teenage girl band, then stands by some more as Currie becomes the group's blonde-bombshell mascot and begins to fall apart from all the drugs and sex and Fowley abuse. And then there's that usual biopic hazard: writing too on the nose, so that you almost see the light bulb over Fowley's head: Young girls! Guitars! Money! The Runaways is paced so briskly that you barely register the externals before you're hurtled along to the next biopic marker.Īlthough Jett is the co-executive producer and Stewart the first-billed star, the film is based on Currie's slim autobiography, written less than a decade after The Runaways imploded in the early '80s. Kristen Stewart is overdoing the twitchy awkwardness. That's a juicy scene, but a couple of things knock it down a peg. Stewart's Jett turns out to be more of a bystander - though the two do have one desultory love scene. Still, when Jett accosts the ghoulish impresario Kim Fowley, played by Michael Shannon, the idea for The Runaways is born.įanning's Currie is the central character in The Runaways, based on the singer's memoir.
She wants to play guitar in a rock band, but in the mid-'70s, the sexist conventional wisdom said girls didn't play electric guitar. club that's also where Kristen Stewart's Joan Jett heads, after buying herself a motorcycle jacket. What do you make of her now? What will she make of herself?"Īfter she's teased by her more worldly sister, Cherie dolls herself up and heads for Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco, a well-known L.A. It's as if the director is saying, "Here's your adorable little child star. What makes this even more outrageous is that Cherie is played by Dakota Fanning, now stretched out and filled out. What she does have is punkish audacity: Her first shot is a splotch of menstrual blood on the pavement, as 15-year-old future Runaways vocalist Cherie Currie gets her first period. So as the '70s girl group The Runaways comes together and then slowly disintegrates, there's a simultaneous rising and falling arc - which would be thrilling if writer-director Floria Sigismondi had a structure that could hold it all together. The Runaways is a curious mix, an exhilarating story of female self-expression that's also a cautionary tale of female exploitation.
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