Movies

You can’t help feeling as you watch The Runaways (2010, written and directed by Floria Sigismondi) that you’re not getting the whole story.

It’s 1975 and rock’n’roll is a man’s world - a Ted Nugent, Aerosmith and Led Zep world, where girls are either groupies or one-off guitar-wielding curiosities like Susie Quatro; A world where David Bowie is the elegant and adored androgene straddling the line between the sexes.  

Enter then, one Joan Marie Larkin, aka Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart). A wannabe guitarist and leather clad Queen of Noise, who, in defiance of practically everything and everyone, puts together an all girl rock band called The Runaways with Sandy West (Stella Maeve), a drummer she is introduced to by freak lothario and producer Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon).  

Add a couple more guitarists, including lead guitarist Lita Ford (played by Scout Taylor-Compton who gets to be one dimensional queen bitch for the entire film) and a front woman, Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), and they’re all set to set fire to the Stateside establishment and take over Japan, like giant, lingerie clad, rock monsters from outer space, apparently.

But even as the band hit their zenith, disaster, in the form of a drugged-up teen front-woman, strikes and the band starts to crumble.

So much for that then.

The Runaways, a hazy, nostalgic, stomp through 70’s sounds, fashion and attitudes (try not fuming when teen Jett’s music teacher smarmily tells her “girls don’t play electric guitar”), is enjoyable enough. 

There’s the ‘platform shoes are funny and hard to walk in’ gag, to go with the ubiquitous 70s sexism, the hilariously irreverent manager and general rock grime.  

But somehow, despite a kick-ass sound track featuring Bowie, Iggy and the Stooges and Runaways covers by the film’s stars, The Runaways fails to ignite, get beneath the skin of the band, or even tell the whole truth.

A 2004 documentary, Edgeplay: A Film about the Runaways, includes claims by members of the band, skipped over in The Runaways, that far from being a benign-if-flaky manager, Kim Fowley allegedly abused the girls both mentally and physically. Turning him into some kind of comic-hero Svengali is perhaps the biggest let down of the film.

So too are the cookie-cutter style rise-and-fall of a band story line, and the annoyingly trite drugs-are-bad morals it espouses. Because we’ve seen all that before and done better in films like Almost Famous (2000) and Sid and Nancy (1986). 

The only thing The Runaways does differently is focus on girls getting messed up and flushing their careers down the toilet. Hoorah for the women’s movement!  

Having said all that, it’s not a badly made film.  The performances are solid enough with Kirsten Stewart’s steel-eyed Jett stalking LA’s mean streets and meaner stages and Dakota Fanning’s self centred Currie sexing up the rock like a teenage nightmare.  Shannon’s Fowley is really a demented treat with his t-shirt slogan rants (“Rock and roll is a blood sport!”, “You girls had better start thinking with your cocks!”) and bizzaro, 70s glam styles.

But it all seems like an exercise in hipness sans substance.  

Ok, so, Joan Jett is, deservedly, hip.  She paved the way for the explosion of women-lead rock in the 90s called Riot Grrrl, tirelessly defends the place of women behind guitars - not just on their knees in front of them, and at 51 still rocks pretty dang hard.  But she comes off best in this film, which she also co-produced, while Currie’s slinky rise and messy fall is tied up a little too neatly – much like the apple pie hair bun and pinnie she’s sporting at the end of the film. 

Currie’s own bid for a solo music career is relegated to a foot note in the closing credits, while Lita Ford, who was a metal icon in her own right in the 80s, doesn’t even get that much.  Sandy West, who died of cancer in 2006, and who by her own account in Edgeplay, had the hardest time after the Runaways broke up, barely gets a line after she helps put the band together.

I know there’s only 90 minutes in a feature film to cram a band’s history into, but it feels like, rather than cutting the dross, they’ve cut the controversy to tell a safe story about why excess sucks, and why when you stick a bunch of girls in a pressure cooker someone’s going to get their eyes scratched out.  In this context both themes really undermine the assertion Jett has been making for 35 years that women belong on the rock stage.  

But it’s not about infighting and 30 year old grudges hamstringing a

story.  It’s about the fact that 35 years after the Runaway’s Cherry Bomb exploded in the faces of rock's boy's club, and despite Jett and Ford’s successful solo careers, Riot Grrrl, and even more recent bands like Gossip and Spinnarette, women still have to work twice as hard as guys to get ahead in rock. 

We still have to explain to our daughters that you don’t just have to be a fan, you can be the band too.  

The Runaways pays lip service to those ideas, but like the band that never really shook its Pygmalion-esque jail-bait beginnings, it just falls a little short.