The film is based on "Neon Angel," the memoir of singer Cherie Currie, who left the band after two tumultuous years of sex, drugs and of course, rock 'n' roll. The black shag haircut, the tomboyish gait, the New York accent (strange, since Jett is originally from Pennsylvania) - they're all traits nailed by "Twilight" actress Kristen Stewart in the new movie "The Runaways," about the life and times of the real-life '70s girl group. The Runaways are presented as having sprung so completely from the brain of Kim Fowley that, when Joan shows up at the end in her ‘80s incarnation as lead singer for the Blackhearts, we never quite get why she was the one who went on to become a feminist rock icon while Cherie, after a brief solo career and years struggling with addiction, reinvented herself as a chainsaw artist.(CNN) - Joan Jett enters her hotel room with all the swagger of - well, Joan Jett. Though Joan reminds Cherie late in the movie that “I write the songs, you just sing them,” the nuts and bolts of composing and recording music-and the pleasure that the girls, or at least Joan, presumably derived from that act-is surprisingly absent from the film. Kristen Stewart looks fabulous in her brunette shag and homemade Sex Pistols T-shirt, but the scene where we watch Joan stencil that shirt is one of the movie’s only glimpses of her creative process. All the high-waisted jeans, glitter platform boots, and sprayed and feathered hair only make Fanning seem more like a skinny schoolgirl invading the dress-up box. (At least no one knocks a glass off a table, signifying the death of another character off-screen.)įirst-time director Sigismondi, who has made music videos for Marilyn Manson, Sheryl Crow, and the White Stripes, excels at capturing the look of the decadent mid-’70s, an era that seems, in retrospect, to have been deliberately striving for maximum ugliness. There are some shots-a close-up of Fanning with smeared mascara, a shot of an abandoned phone booth emitting a busy signal as the receiver swings back and forth-that belong on a roster of images that should be banned from movies forever. Only Fanning’s Cherie is given the chance to change during the movie, but the change she undergoes-from virginal rock aspirant to jaded, trance-eyed addict-is so familiar from earlier music biopics that it hardly registers as a plot at all. Whether shouting down a square music teacher who tell her, “Girls don’t play electric guitar,” or snorting coke in an airplane bathroom, or teaching her bandmates how to masturbate while envisioning Farrah Fawcett, Joan is at all times the picture of hip rocker detachment (which Stewart’s performance translates into mild, mumbling disaffection). Kristen Stewart’s Joan Jett is similarly underwritten, but instead of radiating unmitigated nastiness, she radiates unmitigated cool. Shannon brings his trademark near-unbearable intensity to the role of Kim Fowley-as he mocks and torments the girls, he’s so awful you want to reach into the screen and throttle him-but the part is written as a pure grotesque there’s no trajectory, no back story, no character arc. In a cramped trailer that’s parked in a vacant lot full of garbage, Fowley unleashes sadistic coaching (“Come on, you filthy pussies, let’s rock and roll!”) to hone the girls’ aggressively sexual stage presence.
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