Okay but nothing special

Rating: 5/10 (5 April 2012)

Though it's named after and supposedly about the groundbreaking all-girl rock band of the 1970s, a more accurate title and description of this film would be "The Rise and Fall of Cherie Currie, guest starring Joan Jett and with a special appearance by Kim Fowley". They just took the story Currie wrote in her book about her life, sandwiched in some stuff with Jett and let Michael Shannon tear the scenery apart with his bare teeth. If you wanted to look back through the decades and know who The Runaways were and why they were important, this movie will only give you a glimmer of a clue. Maybe they were so much of their moment that you can't really appreciate them if you weren't there at the time. The fact remains this motion picture doesn't tell you anything you can't see on any one of a hundred "Behind the Music" shows on VH-1.
With that, however, The Runaways is still a satisfactory little flick. Kristen Stewart is great, as always, and Michael Shannon is out the door, down the street, into your home and having sex with your mother as The Runaways' almost Nietzchian record producer. Dakota Fanning is reel purty but isn't asked to do much besides glower or look forlorn. The musical sequences are quite good and there are a couple of moments when writer/director Floria Sigismondi does an excellent job visually projecting what it's like to be inside the cyclone of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll. The movie also touches on the sexism the group had to endure and combat, but only in the most clichéd and hackneyed of ways. As rock bio-pics go, there sure have been a lot worse than this.
What keeps it from being any better is that Cherie Currie's story dominates the movie and it simply isn't that interesting. She's a 15 year old with looks and attitude who got plucked from obscurity to be the band's lead singer, couldn't handle the hard life of being a rock star and crashed back to reality. Joan Jett's tale of ambition and determination takes a decided back seat and the other members of The Runaways can be entirely described as "the jealous one", "the lesbian one" and "the one who barely has any lines and might as well be a mic stand". The best parts are when Shannon's Kim Fowley is completely blunt and ruthless in the molding of these girls young enough to be his daughters into icons of rock, but that largely disappears for the 2nd half of the film. The most intriguing part is how Cherie's older sister Marie (Riley Keough) transforms herself into a mirror image of her little sis. That image suggests so much but none of it is ever explored.
If every member of the band had been given a fair share of the narrative and it had focused more on the struggles between The Runaways and Fowley and between them and the rest of the world, I can't help but think that would have been a much more compelling story. Especially because the look of the movie is outstanding in how it captures the zeitgeist of the 1970s. I'm not sure any character's appearance has better symbolized that era of cultural decadence and stylistic chaos than Fowley's.
If you're a fan of this group, this genre or this time period, you'll probably enjoy The Runaways. Nobody else needs to rush out and watch it, but there's no reason anyone shouldn't give it a look.