Doesn't live up to the real-life Runaways

Rating: 3/10 (18 July 2010)

Musician biopics are, with very few exceptions, all the same movie: Musician works hard and becomes star. Musician's life falls apart because of drugs, sex, ego, or some combination thereof. Musician finds sudden professional and personal fulfillment and everything is rosy.
The Runaways in real life have the potential to tell a number of different stories: There's the story of the band's relationship with Svengali-like producer Kim Fowley as his marketing tactics drive the band to stardom but also help to stand in the way of the band's credibility. There's the story of Joan Jett as her band falls apart while on the verge of a breakthrough and she responds by forming her own band that made her a bigger star than she could have imagined just a few years later. There's the story of Joan Jett and Kim Fowley's vision that an all-female rock band could work and Jett's incredible perseverance to make it happen. And any of these stories could be told without too many changes to the facts.
Yet, "The Runaways" tells none of these stories. Instead, it tells the normal musician biopic story about Cherie Currie with the added "attraction" of a drawn-out build up to a bizarre sort of lesbian sex scene (if it can even be called that) between its two stars and plays fast and loose with the facts to allow that story to be the center of everything. It adds in pieces of the Kim Fowley relationship with the band and references Joan Jett's later success, but the heart of the film is Cherie Currie's story. The film also makes the odd choice of pushing Lita Ford way into the background when the truth is that her undeniable abilities as a guitarist were the band's only real element that added credibility.
The characters are so dull that little can be said of the acting, but Dakota Fanning handles the toughest role of Cherie Currie quite well, even if she is nowhere near sexy enough for Currie as written (which I think is an exaggeration of reality). Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Kristen Stewart, whose performance as Joan Jett leaves much to be desired. She spends the entire movie with the same half-drugged-out look on her face and walks too stiffly and hunched, like someone self-conscious and unsure of herself while her dialogue and the story instead give the impression of someone who has guts and confidence (as is true of Joan Jett in real life). Michael Shannon's performance as Kim Fowley is bordering on over the top, but that also seems appropriate given the character. No one else really has a role to speak of.
The film doesn't really have a continuous visual style other than its love of short shots, often cutting between two or three shots in a scene that would probably be better served by being done in one shot. The real problem with this editing is that it seems as though it is done for the sole purpose of increasing Stewart's and Fanning's screen time, as anytime someone else starts to appear on screen we get a cut to a new angle so that it's again focused on only one of them, often with no logic as to why. The settings lead to a number of scenes with unusual lighting, filled with high contrasts and bright colors, but it never seems to have any dramatic purpose (save the oddly well-lit bathroom in the middle of the dark club where Jett first sees Currie).
All told, it's a pretty poor film that squanders a rich subject matter. It almost feels like the work of a fan who thinks every element is so interesting that it has to be mentioned but picks the wrong thing to say is the central element. There are a number of ways this could have been an interesting film, but none of them really got followed, which is a shame.