The Runaways

The Runaways (2010)
directed by Floria Sigismondi





There is a scene in The Runaways that takes place in a beaten down, gutted out trailer that doubles as a rehearsal space in which producer/guru/Rasputin Kim Fowley, played with verve if not subtlety by Michael Shannon, barks at his young teen girl proteges and instructs them in the ways that rock and roll is hard.  He intones to them that they need scream their feelings and they hit their audiences hard and with brutal and breaking honesty.  This scene is replayed at least three times throughout the film.  It's a schlocky mantra that becomes played long before you've heard the end of it for the first time.  More importantly, it also rings extremely hollow and contradictory as the story unfolds.


The story, if one can be so kind as to call it that, revolves almost exclusively on the relationship between Runaways lead singer, Cherrie Currie (Dakota Fanning) and guitarist Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart). We watch stock footage of their failures and their awkwardness as LA teens.  We see Currie's mother announce she's jetting off to live in Indonesia with her new husband, but Currie and her sister must stay behind.  A scene plays out in which Jett is accosted for attempting to play electric guitar in a lesson and she leaves in a huff offended by the sexism of her instructor.  Currie gets booed off the stage at her high school talent show.  In essence it's the distillation of dozens of biopics and coming of age tales told by rote in a rigid and unimaginative fashion.  While it's only exposition, by the time we get to any actual plot development, the film already seems bloated and floating face down in its own vomit pool.


Fowley happens upon the girls at a nightclub and hatches a plan to start the first all girl rock band.  This is the first of many instances in which the angle of "girl power" is wildly subverted.  Fowley, a creepy and selfish man if we're to learn anything from his on-screen portrayal, molds these young ladies into his nubile quintet of sex kittens for the rock and roll masses.  He's peddling a product even if they're aiming for something higher.


Fanning and Stewart are workmanlike in their performances and they can hardly be blamed for the film's numerous shortcomings.  It's quite obvious they are making the best of a bad situation and there are even a couple of moments where Fanning rises above the din to let out a spark of what's possible in there somewhere if only someone could eke it out to words on a page and good directorial note.  But the script paints nearly all of the major players as exaggerated one note versions of real people and creates almost no nuance or subtext to any moment or conversation.  If the actual Runaways were this vapid, drug addled and clueless, they'd never have made it out of that trailer.


The film does look quite good visually, though.  The deep red hues and golden touches in the set pieces in the film and much of the cinematography touch nicely upon an idealized version of 1970s America and it works well with the motif of the picture.  Several of the concert sequences are well filmed too, but none of this can hope to save The Runaways from being anything more than a hackneyed biopic with a pleasant plastic sheen over its top.


An glammed up look at the short life of the original Runaways lineup, on the surface, might have been a good idea at one time or another.  But, with this telling, the shine quickly fades.  Most of the storylines seem long exhausted before they ever get started and are riddled with cliche; drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, parental abandonment and the desire for a teenager to find her own voice all get the typical treatment without any sense of irony, self-discovery, true redemption or any greater meaning at all.  It is simply told as a straightforward, chronological tale of a band, of its rise and its fall.  It's either told all wrong, or its just a very boring and obvious story.