“The Runaways” features a “Twilight” star breaking free of kid roles and showing her wild side — but it’s Dakota Fanning, not Kristen Stewart.
Stewart plays a very serious teenage Joan Jett, who joins an all-girl rock band in 1975 LA with the aid of an imp/impresario (a very funny Michael Shannon, who is so brilliant the director gives him about five scenes in which he essentially says the same things). He spots a 15-year-old blonde (Dakota Fanning) in a club, tells her he likes her Bowie/Bardot look and her readiness to “kick the s – – t out of a truck driver,” and decides he’s found the lead singer of the Runaways.
“The Runaways,” an entertaining but routine rock flick, chronicles the corruption, rise and fall of Cherie Currie (Fanning), though she didn’t rise very high (number of US hits the band recorded: zero) and didn’t fall particularly hard. Indeed, she’s still alive — “working as a chainsaw artist in the San Fernando Valley.”
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There should have been more of that wit (which appears in a postscript) in the movie, which begins with a charming shot of menstrual blood splatting on a sidewalk. The film then strenuously assures us that it’s liberating for girl rockers to urinate on rivals’ guitars, have sex with each other (though the Stewart-Fanning love scene is a bit tame), annoy their families, growl and generally get strung out. Currie eventually wobbles through a Cobain-level haze of addiction, alienation and ennui. Yay, girls!
There’s a combustible energy to the first half, in which Shannon’s glam producer-manager Kim Fowley keeps telling the bland suburbanites in the band to be skankier, messier, angrier (in motivational speeches he tells them to think, “I hate the f – – – in’ world! My father’s a faggot . . . I want an orgasm!”). Both Shannon and Fanning, who gets to ride an arc from shy to slutty, are gold.
In the downer second half, a drugged-out Currie struts around in a bustier, thigh-highs and a garter belt while Jett takes on the thankless role of the responsible professional who is forever lecturing her friend about her bad habits.
The band doesn’t burn itself up on its own genius so much as fall apart like a ball of lint. Watching the girls argue about their media coverage is particularly dreary.
No great loss. Among bands assembled on the basis of their head shots, I’ll take the Monkees — and maybe even the Spice Girls — over the Runaways, who could not figure out how to make songs out of attitude and riffing. Amusing though it sometimes is, the closest thing the movie offers to a reason for its existence is the post-Runaways success of Jett.
How nostalgic can you be for a band that never made it? For me, the big face-smack of disappeared time came during a scene in which Jett takes a guitar lesson from a lame fogey. Look closely: The teacher is the guy who played Mike Damone in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”