![]() Despite her teenage years in California, Jett's accent retains an East Coast twang. Sitting in a London hotel, dressed in black and with that shaggy haircut intact, she is every inch the tough rocker. As executive producer, she oversaw the making of The Runaways film. Now 51, she holds the anti-corporate ideals of the Seventies dear, but is shrewd enough to run her own record label. When my family saw the movie, they thought it was footage of me!' I wanted her to understand me as a musician, but I wanted her to get me as a person, too. I gave her live tapes from 1976 and tapes of me speaking when I was 14 to help with the accent. 'I spent hours telling her the intimate details about the Runaways,' she continues. And Jett - who went on to forge a solo career with million-selling singles, and has just released a Greatest Hits album - is full of praise for 20-year-old Stewart. The Runaways tells the story of the world's first all-female teenage rock band, five girls from the Los Angeles suburbs who blazed a chaotic trail through the Seventies. Kim Fowley described the music of The Runaways as the “sound of hormones raging” and in her film Sigismondi transcends the formulaic aspects of the story by capturing the gritty spirit of in-your-face teenage rebellion.Nailed it: Joan Jett, left, has been full of praise for Kristen Stewart, right, after she portrayed The Runaways singer It’s the most demanding role in the film and Fanning aces it. Fanning quietly gives Currie an unspoken inner life as she slowly falls apart, and whether she’s smashing pills with her platform heels and snorting the powder off the floor or rocking it out on stage there is a core of sadness to her that is so real you can almost reach out and touch it. Fowley describes her outer layer as part Bardot, part Bowie but she plays Currie as damaged goods a young girl with a crappy home life and faraway look in her eye. You’ve heard of me.” It’s a bravura performance that could have gone very wrong in the hands of a less committed actor, but Shannon pulls it off with wild aplomb.įanning shines, but in a much more low key way. ![]() An egomaniac, he introduces himself as, “Kim Fowley, record producer. ![]() Kristen Stewart is the name above the title star, and she does bring her brooding Brando best to the role of Joan Jett, but this movie belongs to Dakota Fanning and Michael Shannon, who hands in a flamboyant performance.Īs Kim Fowley he has a more than a passing resemblance to Beef from “Phantom of the Paradise,” and like that character he is campy, dangerous and slightly unhinged. Its “Behind the Music” formulaic but Sigismondi layers on so many other rock ‘n’ roll elements that the lack of experimentation in the telling of the tale isn’t a minus. Here Sigismondi leaves behind the surreal feel of her videos and visual art, instead opting for a straightforward (although probably mostly fictional) retelling of the rapid rise and equally rapid free fall of the band. If you want depth wait for the rock ‘n’ roll bio of Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Like the band’s two-minute-forty-five-second guitar punk tunes, “The Runaways” is loud, fast and dirty. Sigismondi has made the movie equivalent of an ear blistering blast of feedback. Unfortunately their ticket out comes in the form of impresario Kim Fowley, a record producer and self proclaimed “King Hysteria.” He cobbles together the band, trains them to be rock stars, convinced that these “bitches are going to be bigger than the Beatles.” Before they can play Shea Stadium, however, the band breaks up-knee deep in ego, drug abuse and bad management. Disaffected SoCal teens, they see an exit from their mundane suburban lives through rock ‘n’ roll. Set back when you could still drink a bottle of stolen booze in the shade of the Hollywood sign without being arrested for trespassing, the movie focuses on two glue sniffing, glam rock obsessed tough girls named Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) and Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning). “The Runaways,” a new film written and directed by former video helmer Floria Sigismondi, sees two “Twilight” co-stars leave behind repressed romance for life on the road. An underage all girl rock band-they billed themselves as “Genuine Jailbait”-spawned from the Sunset Strip’s late 1970s seedy underbelly, they imploded in 1979 after four tumultuous years. Few tales of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll contain as much sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll as the tawdry tale of The Runaways.
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