The Runaways

The Runaways (Director: Floria Sigismondi): I grew up just a few years after the mem­bers of The Runaways, and so not only did I listen to their music, but also to the music they grew up on. That being said, I had very reas­on­able expect­a­tions for this film. No dis­respect to Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning, or dir­ector Floria Sigismondi, but I saw it as a film pitched at young women with no know­ledge of the music or the era. All I was hoping was that the film would deliver the same energy and fun that the music did for me. Which is why I was so pleas­antly sur­prised by the film’s careful recon­struc­tion of the era, down to the tiniest details, as well as by the believ­able and ener­getic per­form­ances. Though it’s not in the same ech­elon as some­thing like Almost Famous, The Runaways deserves to reach audi­ences far beyond the teen­aged demographic.

The arc of a rock and roll movie is pretty standard. The band is formed, learns to play, per­forms in scruffy dives, achieves break­through suc­cess, gets into trouble with drugs, booze, and/or sex, begins to hate their suc­cess and each other, and then breaks up. Sigismondi doesn’t try to rein­vent the wheel, but she does make sure that each stage of the standard rock and roll story feels authentic to the exper­i­ence of one of the first all-girl rock groups in his­tory. But this is also no straight-ahead girl power tract, for that wouldn’t be his­tor­ic­ally accurate.

In 1975, the glam rock move­ment was coming to an end. For the pre­vious five years, male rockers had felt free to exper­i­ment with their styles and their sexu­ality, at least on stage. The suc­cess of andro­gynous rockers like Bowie and Marc Bolan had actu­ally opened the door a crack for women to get into this pre­vi­ously boys-only ter­ritory. Performers like Suzi Quatro had ven­tured into guitar rock, but were always backed by male bands. So when we meet Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) prac­ti­cing elec­tric guitar licks in her bed­room, her only career path seems to be to find some guys to play with. Except that’s not what she wants at all. When she spots pro­ducer Kim Fowley (a per­fectly creepy Michael Shannon) out­side Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco (an influ­en­tial club owned by LA disc jockey Bingenheimer, a man worthy of his own film), she brashly approaches him with her idea for an all-girl rock band. He’s all over the idea, and puts together a four-piece band in short order. But he’s missing the vital piece, a front­woman who is both sexy and glam­orous. When he finds 15-year-old Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), he gets all that with the added bonus of her “jail­bait” status as for­bidden fruit.

Earlier, we’d seen the awk­ward Cherie attempting to crawl out from under her older sister’s shadow. Her love for Bowie gives her a pro­tective mask of glam style, and this is just the look Fowley, Jett, and the newly-christened Runaways are looking for. Sigismondi does an excel­lent job with both Jett and Currie’s “origin” stories, tap­ping into the deep feeling of being dif­ferent from your peers that most cre­ative people feel in high school. Despite their very dif­ferent appear­ances and motives for joining the band, the girls quickly bond, with Jett’s interest obvi­ously a little more than friendly.

Fowley is an abso­lute bas­tard, and we know early on that he cheats them out of their earn­ings. But he is dead-on when he tells them that they need to toughen up if they want to play in a man’s world. He has local kids col­lect trash (including metal cans and pieces of dog shit) to pelt them with while they per­form. This isn’t a typ­ical “girl group,” he tells them, they’re learning to play the cock rock that he feels men have been neg­lecting by wearing lip­stick the past few years. “It’s not about women’s lib, it’s about women’s libido,” is his mem­or­able credo for the band. They’re selling sex, the image of out-of-control underage bad girls, and he knows it will be huge. Turns out he’s right. But it will take the band years to get away from his con­trol. For them, female self-empowerment starts as a gim­mick and only gradu­ally becomes a truth they can live by.

Their suc­cess leads to a recording con­tract and even­tu­ally a tour of Japan, where the wheels start to come off. Jealousies erupt over a sexy photo shoot Fowley arranged just for Currie, and her response is to retreat fur­ther into booze and drugs, des­pite the fact her own father is at home dying from his alco­holism. Though Jett had been her some­time lover, she feels aban­doned by her when the band accuse her of being too self-centred. Tired of Fowley’s con­trol and the band’s resent­ment, she quits.

For Jett, it’s only a tem­porary hiccup. She’s only ever wanted to play rock music, and her drive will take her to the top of the charts a few years later with her new band, the Blackhearts. Currie con­tinues to struggle with her addic­tions and after failed attempts at both a solo singing and an acting career, leaves the enter­tain­ment busi­ness entirely. Years later, she writes her memoir, “Neon Angel,” on which this film is based. As well, Joan Jett served as an exec­utive pro­ducer, so hope­fully that means both women’s remem­brances are accur­ately por­trayed in the film.

Though the story is an old and some­what pre­dict­able one, The Runaways tells it with sass and energy. It’s helped by an amazing soundtrack and as I men­tioned above, by authentic per­form­ances, both dra­matic and musical. Old rockers, take your daugh­ters to this one. You’ll both love it.

Note: Though I haven’t seen the final poster, I assume they’ll use the above one with the stars in it. Sadly, we prob­ably won’t get to see this amazing teaser poster in the theatres.

The Runaways opens in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal on March 19th, expanding nation­wide on April 9th.

Official site of the film

(8/10)

Tagged as: glam, music, punk, rock