I was attending a meeting of the Old Record Store Clerks Group (ORSCG) several months ago, and after the usual reindeer games (exchanging early 90′s 7-inches of bands nobody ever cared about, comparing casual footwear we’re too old to be wearing, sucking in beer guts to show off our vintage/ novelty t-shirts, complaining how the kids today don’t care), somebody happened to mention the fact that there was a film about the Runaways, the mid-70′s all-girl rock band many of us loved, coming out. The idea was greeted coolly, particularly when we heard about the casting of Disney perennials Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning as the band’s focal points, Joan Jett and Cherie Currie.
“What’s the point of this?” I remember saying. “They were never popular.”
Nobody could argue with that, and the subject was dropped. We finished up the meeting, exchanged the secret handshakes, and returned home to our dismal studio apartments where we all drank beer alone and quietly despaired over how we’d wasted our lives so horribly. It’s a ritual.
So, with that in mind, you can imagine my surprise when I tell you that, not only is The Runaways a good movie–darned good in some ways–but that the cast, in particular Fanning, is terrific. The writer and director, Floria Sigismondi, working from Currie’s memoirs, crafts an early 1970′s milieu of a Los Angeles coated in grime and glitter, as the wretched hippies had all gone on to snort coke in Laurel Canyon, leaving the city streets to the kids who were listening to David Bowie and KISS to figure out where the new sound was going to come from.
One of the key figures in not only finding that sound, but exploiting it, would be Kim Fowley, the bubblegum charlatan of Sunset Strip who, played in a fantastic performance by Michael Shannon, with his cocaine rap, showbiz chutzpah and unerring eye for the fabulous was, and is, a legendary figure of the rock scene. It was Fowley who set the wheels in motion.
The Runaways started, as was often the case in rock ‘n’ roll, as a scam. Fowley met wanna-be guitarist Joan Jett outside a Hollywood night club and, admiring her ambition and always able to see a buck in the equation, he came up with the idea of putting together a band of teenage girls. The other girls, Sandy West, Jackie Fox and Lita Ford, slowly joined up, but they needed a lead singer. Fowley and Jett meet 15-year-old glam doll Cherie Currie in a club and ask her to audition. A Bowie devotee, Currie is able to sing passably enough so that the band is quickly put to wood shedding where they scraped together a handful of songs, including the classic ‘Cherry Bomb”.
Standard rock band bio-pic shenanigans commence, with the added drama of both Jett’s and Currie’s private lives interfering. Currie’s mother (played by Tatum O’Neal in a bit of stunt casting–she co-starred with Currie in 1980′s Foxes, along with Robert Romanus, Damone of Fast Times fame, who here plays Jett’s guitar teacher) has moved overseas with her new husband, leaving Cherie and her sister Marie to care for their alcoholic father. Jett is essentially living as a squatter, and also slowly coming to terms with her own sexuality. Poverty is the name of the game, even as Fowley’s hustling gets them a record deal and a chance to tour. Success is slow to arrive, and the band all begin dealing with the inevitable squabbling triggered by booze, drugs, overactive hormones and a simmering resentment that the more sexualized antics of Currie’s stage performance are overshadowing the rest of the band. The Runaways did have some brief success in Japan, but the trip there eventually leads to the collapse of the original group, as Currie soon leaves and, while Jett soldiers on for a while under the band name, she soon decides to go solo.
The story is nothing new, but what sets The Runaways apart from the usual jive is Fanning’s performance, which belies her age and indicates that she is working very hard to avoid the traps of the business that most of her peers never will. Presenting Currie as a complex character who loves the spotlight and the attention it derives, but also as someone dealing with a family dynamic of a sick father and a bitter sister, Fanning proves surprisingly adept and is clearly using Jodie Foster as the blueprint for future success.
What do we make of Kristen Stewart? Her portrayal of Jett is quite good, and physically she’s a perfect match. It is fortunate for her that, while a dynamic performer, Joan Jett was never the most loquacious of personalities so Stewart’s usual emotionless monotone and Quaalude stare actually serves her well here. Twilight has made her rich, but if Stewart ever hopes to have much of a career not involving Big Shirtless Wolfmen, she’d best hope that Jett is planning a biographical trilogy akin to The Lord of the Rings. Short of that, I can’t see this lasting much longer.
The pantheon of good ‘rock’ movies is a pretty exclusive group (A Hard Day’s Night, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park), but, while The Runaways has its problems, I think the spirit of the enterprise puts it in the ‘win’ colunm. Rock ‘n’ roll is an exhausted medium, dead both from neglect and overeating, and it’ll never mean what it once did, but for those interested in a bit of archaeology, The Runaways, as a movie and a band, are rare gems. I’d bring this up at the next ORSCG meeting, but it’s been cancelled. Everybody in the group has had to move in with their folks. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]
Biography/Drama/Music
Rated R
DVD Release Date: 7/20/10