Enjoyable, But Not as Great As Expected

Rating: 6/10 (16 August 2010)

This film is something of a biopic, following the band the Runaways from its inception to its disbanding. In particular, the focus is on Cherrie Currie and Joan Jett, leaving the other members -- notably Lita Ford -- as mere background footage.
I liked "Runaways", but it's really not all that great. If you don't already have a solid understanding of who Joan Jett, Cherrie Currie and Lita Ford are, it didn't really explain things. It was also lopsided in that it focused on Joan despite being based on the book about Cherrie, and Kristen Stewart made very little attempt to go outside her "safe" range of acting. In other words, it was like watching Stewart, not Jett.
Dakota Fanning is capable of amazingly innocent or not-so-innocent roles, but despite this film being based on Currie's biography, her character comes off as the minor one to Joan Jett. Granted, as Jett today is the bigger star, this makes sense... but then the focus was disjointed. Fanning was able to be a dirty glam-loving rebel, so it is too bad her part was played down.
Beyond that, as I said, the focus was disjointed and you had to know the story going into it. Nothing was expressed too explicitly, so when the band rises and falls, and meets up with various problems, it seems that none of them are fully explored. One solution would be to add twenty or thirty minutes on to the movie, but this would do little to save it if that filler was just more of Kristen Stewart.