The Runaways - Reviews+Stills [Sundance 2010]

Subject: The Runaways - Reviews+Stills [Sundance 2010] Tue Jan 26, 2010 11:18 am

Sundance Review: The Runaways

Here’s something interesting that I learned tonight, following the Sundance press screening of The Runaways. Pedophilia is being sexually attracted to a pre-adolescent. This is about age 13 and younger. Being sexually attracted to someone who is mid to late-adolescent (ages 15-19) is called Ephebophilia. I would like to thank CHUD’s Devin Faraci for that little tidbit, as it comes in handy when trying to describe the experience of seeing The Runaways. It is a movie that — like the band upon which it is based — challenges you at every turn not to be sexually stimulated by a bunch of adolescent girls. Namely, now 15-year old Dakota Fanning.

Fanning stars as Cherie Currie, the lead singer of the all-girl rock band that tore the world a new one back in the late 70s. She saunters around on screen in her underwear, just as the real life Currie titillated a generation of young men. She strips down, delivers the progression of Currie from sweet little girl with a tough look to bonafied, drug-addled cherry bomb. And along the way, we buy it all. Why? Because Fanning’s performance is mature, emotive and as dynamic as we’ve seen from any young actress in the past 5-years. And yes, she even makes out with Kristen Stewart on screen, extensively. It’s disturbingly sexy. Once again, there will be Ephebophilia for the men in the audience.

Speaking of Stewart, she plays Joan Jett, the lead guitarist and perhaps most enduring member of The Runaways. From the start, Jett was an intense, aggressive gal who wanted nothing more than to rock out in ways that girls weren’t supposed to do. Stewart captures the intensity perfectly, but never completely immerses herself in the character. She’s aggressive, sexual and all things rock-n-roll. And that’s enough to carry the film alongside Fanning. Or so you might think.

Also added to the mix is Michael Shannon, who is insanely good as eccentric producer Kim Fowley. He’s the insane, egomaniacal long lost brother of (1970s) David Bowie, and he takes it to the limit. Or at least, the limits for which this movie would allow.

Which is what brings me to the first problem with The Runaways. It’s the VH1 version of the story the band. Sure, there is enough drug use and girls kissing girls to have the Twilight mom’s double thinking their daughters participation in opening weekend. And there’s enough nudity and overt cursing to secure an R-rating with this cut. But it feels watered down. The record shows that Fowley was criminally overwhelming and eccentric, and that the girls went further off the deep end of the sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll movement than is depicted. Even though a lot of that did make it into the film.

That leads me to problem number two. The movie is too adult, too edgy. I found myself questioning who would see this movie? Will mothers take their young daughters out to see this movie if it lands the aforementioned (and deserved) R-rating? This wouldn’t be bad, as young girls in this day and age could use a little Runaways music in their lives. And they already go crazy for Kristen Stewart. But is seeing her snort coke off of Dakota Fanning’s hand and have all-girl threesomes what they want to see? I have my doubts.

It’s an interesting discussion, that which I’ve had in the preceding paragraphs. But it’s ultimately one that doesn’t matter. Mostly because the second and third acts of this movie are a complete mess. What begins as a sexually charged, energetic rock love story featuring two actresses pouring their souls into two icon characters grinds to a halt as the story progresses beyond the formation of the band. To put it lightly, the final 60 minutes of this movie is a series of aggressively loud, overly stylized and (somehow) uninspired sequences chronicling the fall of the band. It’s uninspired because it lacks narrative fluidity — it feels choppy. This choppiness dispels all of the emotional weight that could have been had in the film’s final moments. Instead of rocking all the way, The Runaways crawls to a haphazard stop. It’s not quite the epic finish that the real life Runaways experienced. But then again, this exploitative, oddly safe (yes, those two opposing ideas exist in one film) piece of work doesn’t exactly capture their spirit, either.

Sundance Review: The Runaways

I'll be blunt about this: I really wasn't looking forward to this movie. I'm not the biggest fan of lip-chewing, hair-twirling Kristen Stewart, or the wide-eyed, blank face expert Dakota Fanning. I love rock and roll (so put another dime in the jukebox, baby) as much as the next person, but these two starring in a movie about an all-girl, teen sensation, flash in the pan band from the 1970s? I just didn't think they could pull it off. Hey, at least I'm big enough to admit I was wrong. The Runaways rocked the Joan Jett / Cherie Currie backstory's pants off (literally), and I'll be buying the soundtrack, which features K-Stew and D-Fan singing the blasts from the past.

However, this movie really should have been called The Joan Jett & Cherie Currie Show, because the other Runaways are hardly featured in this movie at all. Sandy West (who co-founded the band with Joan Jett), and Lita Ford's stories aren't given much attention in the film, and Ford seems to exist just to cause drama. Additionally, The Runaways had six different bass players during their short four-year history (including Micki Steele who went on to The Bangles) so the filmmakers decided to create a fictional girl named Robin Robins. She's played by Alia Shawkat of Arrested Development fame, and she unfortunately gets only one or two lines.

Although he's not given as much screen time as Fanning and Stewart, Michael Shannon takes this movie, straps it to his back, and walks away with it completely. He plays their over the top manager Kim Fowley, and he looks like Frankenstein meets David Bowie. He chews up scenery left and right and steals every moment he's onscreen, even when he has no lines. At one point, he just gives a monsterly grimace on the other end of a phone call, and owns that entire moment. When he realizes he's bottled the lightning, he caws "You bitches are gonna be bigger than the f**king Beatles!" Although the relationship between Currie and Jett is caustic at times, Fowley is definitely the bad guy in this movie.

In the effort of cramming their story into two hours, the film rushes through the Joan Jett story as she rags on her guitar teacher for trying to instruct her with "On Top Of Old Smoky" and telling her "Girls don't play electric guitar." In a blink, she's meeting Kim Fowley at Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco in Hollywood, and Fowley, smelling money and opportunity, introduces Jett to drummer Sandy West. They start jamming with Fowley listening, who is seemingly coked to the gills with a bent towards pedophilia. He decides the band needs, as he so eloquently illustrates with his finger pointed at a woman's crotch, more sex. He and Jett go trolling for the face of the band back at Bingenheimer's, where they find Mountain Dew-sipping Fanning, complete with feathered-blonde hair, and ask her to audition.

Fast-forward to Jett and West now with Lita Ford and their fictitious bass player rehearsing in a ramshackle trailer in the Valley. Currie shows up to audition, having rehearsed a Suzi Quatro cover song all night, but Fowley quickly nixes it. They end up writing "Cherry Bomb" on the spot, and with some coaxing, Currie nails it. Then he puts the girls through rock and roll boot camp, which includes teenaged boys throwing trash and dogshit at them, so they can learn how to deal with hecklers. With lightning speed, they're off and running, playing parties in Los Angeles, hitting the road for shows, cutting a record, and touring Japan.

But the real story takes place in the cracks between the electric soundtrack. Kristen Stewart steps out of her normal angsty girl act and nails down the punk rock, hard as nails Jett, and Fanning is equally as good with her disconnected portrayal of Currie, who is dealing with the fact that she's abandoning her alcoholic father and her twin sister Marie (played as fraternal in the movie, although they were identical in real life) to embrace a life of rock and roll. It's not long before the girls are full-on in the swing of drugs while on the road, and Fanning and Stewart share an extremely intimate kiss on the floor of a skating rink before the camera swirls them up into a heavily implied sex scene, which is something the movie doesn't shy away from. We see Fowley banging some woman while on a phone call, Currie having sex in a dressing room, and Jett teaching Sandy West how to masturbate ... to Farrah Fawcett.

The Runaways flamed out in four quick years, although that timeline feels a lot shorter in this film. By the time the band begins to break up, it only feels like a few months have passed, and that's the only real fault in the movie. To try and keep this under two hours long, they've compacted four years of the first influential, teenaged, all-girl rock band into the Almost Famous story. By the end of the film, Jett is enjoying the rise of her solo fame, and Currie has taken a different path. There are crawls telling us what happened to Jett, Currie, and Fowley, but no mention of the other Runaways, which mirrors the movie. Powerful performances from Stewart, Fanning, and Shannon, and a song showcase that puts in bold what the Runaways were all about, while giving a bit of short shrift to the other band members. These girls were, for a very short time, the Queens of Noise. Fanning's concert performance of "Cherry Bomb" will be ringing in your ears for days.

One final note: Beware Twihards and Twi-Moms, this is not your sweet and innocent Bella. Kristen Stewart's Joan Jett urinates on electric guitars, pops pills, snorts coke, and loves other ladies. Just a fair warning.

Kristen Stewart’s THE RUNAWAYS Reviews: Sundance 2010

In The Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Honeycutt calls Kristen Stewart’s performance as The Runaways singer Joan Jett "the driving force" of Floria Sigismondi’s debut narrative film The Runaways, which co-stars Dakota Fanning and Michael Shannon. Tatum O’Neal, a child star and already an Oscar winner at the time Jett’s band came to prominence in the mid-’70s, has a supporting role in the film.

At Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman says he was curious to see if Stewart "could leave her swoony Twilight mopiness behind her and play a rock & roll princess with down-and-dirty spunk. (Verdict: She can.)"

Honeycutt was less impressed with the drama itself, calling The Runaways "neither a biopic nor a concert film … the film does prefer music and bad behavior to insight, character or substance," adding that "maybe the film falls into the category of Guilty Pleasures. The dark ugliness on display — the amazing drug abuse and pre-AIDS hedonism — looks probably too exciting. While the film makes it clear its personalities suffered tremendously for their addictions, it all looks so glam."

Gleiberman was just as unimpressed with the film: "When it gets away from the stage, however, and from the iconography of strutting she-devil-in-lingerie empowerment, The Runaways is just a watchable, rather so-so rock biopic, with the thinly imagined characters and desultory, one-thing-after-another episodic slackness of a TV movie."

Collider.com’s Steve Weintraub was more enthusiastic about The Runaways, telling his readers that "while there was a lot of debate if the film would show a no-holds-barred account of what The Runaways really went through back in the 70’s – like the drug use and the in-band make-out sessions – not only does the film show a warts-and-all look at what happened to the band – at times you’ll feel like you’re watching documentary footage from the era as Stewart and Fanning are really playing and singing in the film, and they both deliver inspired performances."

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Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning grow up for 'The Runaways'

PARK CITY — Kristen Stewart had three weeks to switch gears from acting as the lovesick, vulnerable Bella Swan in "New Moon" to Joan Jett, the tough rocker chick she plays in the Sundance film "The Runaways."

But the actress said she didn't give the drastic character change too much thought, and even discovered a softer side to the indestructible Jett.

Despite her reputation as the hardened frontwoman of The Runaways, a pioneering all-girl teenage rock band that gained fame in the '70s, Jett is "really sweet," Stewart said.

"She's very righteous. … I know that sounds weird — but she is the way she is because she stands up for what she thinks is right."

After meeting the real Joan Jett and Jett's former bandmate Cherie Currie, Stewart said the story became more personal to her and she had more appreciation for the possibilities for girls nowadays.

"The Runaways" follows the struggle of Jett and Currie as they fight against the odds of their time to find success in a male-dominated rock music scene.

"If nobody ever told her (Jett) to sit down and shut up, she might not be the way she is today," Stewart said.

Neither of the actresses, both born in the '90s, knew much about The Runaways before preparing for their roles in the film.

But they took a crash course on the band, with Stewart and Dakota Fanning learning vocals for some of The Runaways' biggest hits, including "Cherry Bomb," and Stewart learning the guitar chords for six other songs from Joan Jett herself.

As for a future singing career, Fanning said she can't imagine ever taking the microphone as herself, but could see herself taking on other singing/acting roles in the future.

The 15-year-old star said she took on the role of Currie because she was fascinated by the story and wanted The Runaways brought to the attention of an audience that might otherwise never know about them.

Playing a hard rock chick known as the sex kitten of the band, Fanning said there are some parts of Currie's life she will never understand, but other aspects are more familiar.

"I can understand being 15 and not knowing who you are yet and trying to figure it out while in the middle of this rock and roll scene," Fanning said.

With newfound appreciation for the legendary Southern California group, Fanning said the most significant thing she learned during filming was the realization that there was once a time when being in a rock band was "not the norm" for girls.

"I don't think there will ever be another band like The Runaways," Fanning said. "All girl bands don't have the same struggle that they had."

Again... what the hell happend to Bella and Jane? haha xxx

Haha they went back in time!! They look so old and different don't they!x

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