Directed by Floria Sigismondi. Starring Dakota Fanning, Kristen Stewart, Michael Shannon, Stella Maeve, Scout Taylor-Compton 16 cert, gen release, 106 min
Here's a tip for any director making a film about a woman trying to succeed in a male- dominated environment. Do not, under any circumstances, follow up a major disappointment with a scene in which the protagonist mopes to a cover of James Brown's It's a Man's Man's Man's World.
Such a sequence appears about half an hour into this tepid rock biopic, and it exemplifies a project that – though occasionally rather rousing – avoids no opportunity to take the obvious option.
The subject under discussion is The Runaways. Emerging in the mid-1970s, when rock still expected “girls” to strum acoustic guitars and warble about peace, the all-female band offered punters an impressive class of proto-punk sleaze before combusting in the usual morass of amphetamines, sour-mash whisky and petty jealousy. Their legacy was the spirited mainstream belter who goes by the name of Joan Jett.
Floria Sigismondi, an Italian photographer making her feature debut, does invest the film with a degree of rough, dog-eared energy. Michael Shannon is acceptably sleazy as Kim Fowley, the band’s notorious mentor, and the frayed music remains modestly invigorating.
The casting is, however, not a success. Both Kristen Stewart, who plays Jett, and Dakota Fanning, who takes the role of singer Cherie Curry, exhibit the wrong kindof rampaging teenage disapproval. Deadened and numb in the manner of early 1990s grunge artists, rather than aggrieved and bitter in the post-glam style, the pair (talented actors both) unwittingly prove that, though youth may well be perennially disgusted, it tends, as the decades pass, to exhibit that disgust in subtly different ways.
Moreover, The Runawaysoverreaches itself in the last act, when it appears to argue for Joan Jett as a significant cultural icon. You, madam, are no Patti Smith. You are no Deborah Harry. Let's not get carried away here.
