The Runaways

Overview

A drop of blood hits the hot California pavement and everything changes. Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), a Bowie-obsessed teen girl has hit puberty, and, as the song about her goes, hello world she's your wild girl. Across town, her future bandmates Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) and Sandy West (Stella Maeve) practice and prowl, having been introduced by their Svengali of a manager, Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon), who pulls the band together at Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco club.

Floria Sigismondi's Runaways biopic opens in 1975, a precise moment in time when glam rock was exotic and girls stayed in front of the stage. The characters are infamous and so, too, are its stars, Stewart and Fanning, blowing off their vampiric Twilight roles for a brief, much-appreciated moment to embody Jett and Currie respectively.

Often remembered (incorrectly) as the first manufactured all-girl band, the Runaways have a complex history, part wild teen girl mayhem, part Fowley-controlled, "genuine jailbait" image. Informed by Currie's tell-all autobiography and executive produced by Jett, The Runaways captures this tension perfectly, with the eccentric Fowley, brilliantly played by Shannon, schooling them on "thinking with their cocks" all the while pocketing profits and orchestrating controversy in the press.

Sigismondi, mostly known for her music videos, follows the brief triumphs of the band and its crushing demise, rolling out all the usual rock biopic markers: first show, first tour, first international tour, first drug habits, first ego, first breakdown, first break-up. That said, to Sigismondi's credit, The Runaways keeps its initial energy throughout the lion's share of the film, and the characters are complicated and ferocious — their tale all too familiar but still one that manages to remain genuinely exciting.

Runaways fans shouldn't be as nervous as I was about this film; it certainly does the band justice (despite skipping over a sizeable amount of their later history and line-up changes) and Stewart and Fanning are wholly convincing as two of the most important women in rock history. We don't have a star rating here at Concrete Playground, so instead I'll tell you this: I have seen this film three times already and I'm still excited to see it again when it hits theatres.

See it first at Popcorn Taxi Wednesday, July 7, featuring a live Q&A with Cherie Currie from LA. It opens in cinemas on July 15.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=OTpdXKocacQ