By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 2.5 cats
Director: Flora Sigismondi
Starring: Alia Shawkat | Dakota Fanning | Kristen Stewart | Michael Shannon | Scout Taylor-Compton | Stella Maeve
Country: united_states
Year: 2010
Running time: 106
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1017451/
TC says: “If you were around in the late 70s, you know the kind of sexist conditions that girls who wanted to rock out ran into. That’s the ultimate story behind THE RUNAWAYS, the story of the groundbreaking all-girl punk band formed in 1975 by guitarist Joan Jett, drummer Sandy West, and record producer Kim Fowley.
“Kristen Stewart breaks out of the TWILIGHT typecast mold here, doing an amazingly eerie take on Jett, while Dakota Fanning steps into the shoes of lead singer Cherie Currie. The movie follows Joan’s first attempts at playing rock and roll, and the fateful meeting with producer Fowley which starts the ball rolling. They later meet up with Currie and cajole her into becoming the lead singer of the band. What follows is a whirlwind of hard life on the road, lots of the usual 70s rock star life – sex, drugs, rock and roll – and experimentation with bi-sexuality and lesbian attractions to each other.
“Shannon delivers a potential Oscar performance here as the badgering, bullying Svengali-like producer who writes the groups first songs, including the signature song Cherry Bomb, and he manages to grab and hold every scene he’s in. Fowley’s interaction with the group, particularly Jett and Currie, is fascinating to watch, as he trains the girls how to handle hecklers, how to handle an older, male-dominated audience, and a male-dominated profession, but unfortunately not how to handle the emotional strain of fame and fortune at 16.
“First-time director Floria Sigismoni has made some interesting choices as well, using some really unusual and stand-out cinematography to capture the different moods and feelings during the five year ride; soft fuzzy closeups during the sexual encounters, to trippy colors and a variety of lenses for the drug sequences, close-ups at
“Neither Fanning nor Stewart have ever been better – they are both stepping out and growing up as actresses, and both prove in their work here that they were deserving of being named PNR Rising Stars, Fanning in 2007 and Stewart in 2009.
“All in all, I found it to be a fascinating and outstanding film. I don’t remember the group very well – I remember Cherie Currie first as a co-star of the movie FOXES, and Jett first with the Blackhearts – but their story deserved to be told, and as they say in the music biz, ‘what a long, strange trip it’s been.’ 4 1/2 cats”
Michael says: “I hate to say it, but… Run away, run far away from THE RUNAWAYS.
“There’s a fascinating movie to be made about The Runaways, but it’s not this half-assed collection of rock ‘n roll clichés. Based on a novel by Cherie Currie (lead vocalist of The Runaways) and Executive Produced by Joan Jett, THE RUNAWAYS looks at the rapid rise and fall of the first all-girl rock band, which seems to actually be all about Cherie and Joan with three backing musicians. Which is too bad, because Stella Maeve makes drummer Sandy West fascinating, and Scout Taylor-Compton makes you want much more of Lita Ford. And while Kristen Stewart does an uncanny Joan Jett, Dakota Fanning as Currie and director Floria Sigismondi are in way over their heads.
“There were so many threads that could have spun cinematic gold had they been the focus: the first all-girl rock band who actually played their instruments thrust into the world of male dominant cock-rock; the fascinating threesome of Currie, Jett and Ford and their respective trajectories; Currie’s broken home life; or even Jett and drummer West’s desire to be in a real band when the press just wanted to focus on Currie’s sex-kitten persona. Instead Sigismondi hangs on every rock ‘n roll cliché, drugs, sex, posturing, the controlling producer… filled with half fleshed-out concepts that just leave you wanting something more substantial.
“All the film really does is make you want to run home and do a Wikipedia search on the band and see what their real story was. Perhaps if they had based the film on something more objective than Currie’s memoir we could have gotten something much more objective. As it is there could have even been something interesting to be made about Currie and Jet, but Sigismondi couldn’t quite cut it. Oh yeah, and how I would have loved if they had included Bangles-bassist Michael Steele (the first bassist for The Runaways) represented here. 2 cats.”
TC responds: “Wow…our feelings couldn’t have been more opposite, as my review showed…we both loved this film. And I definitely disagree about Fanning and director Sigismondi, who’s techniques we all loved…
“Sorry it wasn’t to your liking…ah well….hopefully we won’t be totally alone in liking this film a lot..heh heh heh…”
Jason responds: “You’re pretty close to being alone in it; the release has been the same sort of unmitigated disaster that the movie is. It started with roughly 240 screens in limited release, but by the time it reached its platform expansion a few weeks later, it had lost so many that ‘expanding’ just got it to 40 fewer than where it started.
“Part of this is probably has to do with it having a tiny distributor in Apparition that can’t do as much promotion as even someone like Magnolia or IFC (although I think it got more than you’d expect), but folks have been staying away in droves. Oddly, the critical reception has generally been positive, but the folks who hate it REALLY hate it.
“As well they should. It’s bad enough that it feels like a paint-by-numbers rock biopic, but it’s just so boring. One of the things that had me looking at the ceiling, wishing I had a watch to check, and pondering the digestion of my dinner was that these characters never actually *DO* anything. Joan and Cherie just seem to float through the movie without ever making any sort of decision. It’s like the director actively cut out anything that involved them moving their own story forward (and a bunch of interesting stuff on the cutting room floor would certainly go a ways toward explaining why Alia Shawkat is in this movie, third-billed, despite not having a line).
“Terrible. 1 cat, with Dakota Fanning having the inside track on being in the worst movie in general release two years in a row.”