Authentic but unoriginal film-making

Rating: 6/10 (21 June 2010)

Truth may often be stranger than fiction, but that doesn't mean it makes an interesting film, and this is a classic case in point. Having hit the music scene at the very end of the 70's and been immediately hooked by Siouxsie & The Banshees and their contemporaries, I was vaguely aware of Joan Jett, but not much more than that. Despite what I thought was an excellent central performance by Kristen Stewart, I didn't come out of the cinema after this film feeling that I'd learnt a whole lot more about Joan Jett, or her place in history. There was no doubt that The Runaways gave tradition a good kick in the teeth, and hacked a fearsome swathe through a stale, male-dominated industry – but the sense of how difficult and cutting edge it must have been to form an all-girl teenage band at that time felt underplayed.
Instead, we are treated to a formulaic and generic sex'n'drugs'rock'n'roll story that applies to so many bands, concentrating on the interplay between the 2 leads and their producer/manager, egos over-inflated by sudden success and nihilistic burn-out. Whilst The Runaways may have been one of the first to go through this process in real life, in terms of rock biopics, they're very late to the party, and it just felt like a clichéd resume offering nothing that we hadn't already seen before in other, better genre movies – for example, both 'Breaking Glass' and the outstanding 'Almost Famous' are more accomplished, satisfying and engaging pieces of film-making, albeit largely works of fiction.
So, a standard, angry rebel rock bio-pick that is well-made and thumps along nicely, but what it offered in authenticity (apart from the rubbish plastic dogshit) it lacked in originality. 6.5/10