Three stars (out of five). Rating: R, for underage drinking, drug use and sensuality, and relentless profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.15.10
Buy DVD: The Runaways
As immaturity, frayed tempers and atrocious lifestyle choices take their toll, the other four members of the ground-breaking all-grrl punk-rock band The Runaways turn on their photogenic lead singer, objecting to the way that she repeatedly steals the spotlight.
"We're not the Cherie Currie band," one of them snarls, "we're The Runaways!"
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| While Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart, left) watches nervously, newcomer Cherie Curie (Dakota Fanning, center) is humiliated into exposing her inner slut during an "audition" that feels more like a casting-couch session for a porn film, in a seminal moment during the creation of the all-girl band that is destined to become The Runaways. Are these girls really having fun? |
Well, here's the irony: This film may be hitting theaters as The Runaways, but that's untruth in advertising. It should be called The Cherie Currie Story.
On one level, at least, that shouldn't come as a surprise; writer/director Floria Sigismondi's screenplay is adapted from Currie's memoir, Neon Angel
. Small wonder, then, that this film spends so much time on Currie, at the expense of the other four girls ... even though one of them is Joan Jett, the only member to have clawed her way into a solid and respectable career after The Runaways crashed and burned. Small wonder, perhaps, but bad filmmaking. Dakota Fanning's Currie and Kristen Stewart's Jett are front and center for 99 percent of this picture.
The other three band members are ignored to a degree that's initially puzzling and eventually just plain silly, and one of them — Alia Shawkat's Robin — is a fictitious construct apparently intended to stand in for the various "minor" girls (Micki Steele, Peggy Foster, Jackie Fox, Vicki Blue and Laurie McAllister) who were part of the tempestuous line-up that also included Sandy West (played here by Stella Maeve) and Lita Ford (Scout Taylor Compton).
Sigismondi similarly plays fast and loose with actual Runaways history, and has a terrible sense of the passage of time.
Although the film has a firm beginning in 1975, we never really know how many years actually pass as the fledgling band builds up a following that climaxes with a tour of Japan (for the record, in 1977) that rivaled The Beatles' original arrival in the United States, for sheer demented fan adulation.
And that — again, for the sake of accuracy — essentially was it. Currie decamped after the band returned to the States, a crucial event that Sigismondi depicts of necessity ... but then "time passes" and, in something of an epilogue, we see Jett, following the smash 1979 single ("I Love Rock 'n' Roll") that put her on the solo map. Cue power anthem, roll final credits.
Well ... not quite.
