Directed by Floria Sigismondi
Joan Jett was only 16 when she started the all-girl band The Runaways. This was in the 1970s, just after she had been informed by a music teacher that girls didn’t play electric guitars and she should stick to strumming ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’. Kristen Stewart, who is 4 years older than that, puts on a sneer and plenty of tough-chick attitude as she teams up with three other girls and in-you-face record producer Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon). According to Fowley, it was time when men wanted to see women in the kitchen or on their knees, and breaking into the machismo world of rock was not about women’s lib – but women’s libido.
However, the film does not centre on Joan Jett’s rise to fame, and her chart-toppers are only included as the film closes. Based on the autobiography by Cherie Currie (Neon Angel: the Cherie Currie Story), the fifteen year old lead singer in the band, the film is more about what the girls went thorough in order to become the first successful all-female rock band. With an alcoholic father and an absent mother, Cherie (played by Dakota Fanning who was 15 at the time the film was shot) was ripe for exploitation and all the pitfalls of success.
Kim Fowley is truly creepy as the he pushes Cherie to become a Bowie-Bardot sex kitten and only her twin sister Marie (played by Elvis Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough) can see the effects the drastic demands are having on her. ‘Cherry Bomb’ became a number one song in Japan where the band toured and apart from playing to the screaming crowds, the girls get access to plenty of drugs and sexual experiences. The drug-induced cinematography helps by drawing the audience into their bleary, out of control existence.
Lezly Herbert
