Stinky-stinky-stinky-stinky STINKY BOMB!

Rating: 1/10 (23 November 2010)

The Runaways were a wicked rock'n'roll experience. An excitement generated live, but never transferred onto their recording. Hence their popularity was short lived. Joan Jett was able to capture a trace of what they were aiming for on her bubblegum hits of the 80s. But the high point of the Runaways experience wasn't musical. It occurred in Cherie Currie's autobiography published long after the break-up. Her vivid and insightful writing ranks among the best celebrity bios ever. As entertaining in its own way as Errol Flynn's "My Wicked Wicked Ways".
Twenty years after publication, Jett and Currie let the movie industry have a go at their story, knocking the Runaways back to square one - their story a mess, the Runaways experience again transferred poorly for the masses. The chief element missing is rock'n'roll spirit. There's nothing cool like that here. A lot of pretentious posing by Hollywood types aping MTV videos from the 90s, smarmy camera-work and all. There's nothing of a punk or 70s rock aesthetic in the art direction. It had an alleged $10 mil budget, which pulls it way out of the "Independent Cinema" category. It looks and feels like 100% prefab Hollywood mainstream media junk. No unique vision compels the camera.
The only point to the story is the climactic neon lesbian scene between Stewart and Fanning. It's the one spot in the narrative that starts to sprout wings. But, like every other intriguing element of Currie's book, writer/director Sigismondi flushes it down the toilet to nowheresville. No emotional relationship is formed between the characters. Cherie's book is about real characters, their complex relationships interrelationships and their reactions under pressure. Sigismondi's cliff notes version shows that she hasn't a clue about what needs to be done to put this on the screen. Human relationships no longer translate in the plastic one-dimensional 21st century Hollywood mind. Organic narrative strands do not compute.
Her camera shows us a handful of generic washed-out characters, none of whom care about any of the other generic washed-out characters and nobody appears to be minding the music. Where Currie's book presents situations with a sarcastic tongue-in-cheek, Sigismondi extends a disconnected grimness. Where Currie planted her anger and wit, Sigismondi reaps incoherent navel gazing. What were the Runaways "rebelling"against? The boredom of suburbia? A male dominated music industry? That isn't clear. The slight adversity they meet is set up by Sigismondi like so many straw men.
Kristen Stewart is OK – it looks like she watched a few episodes of Happy Days and channeled Jett through The Fonze. Better than Dakota Fanning who is hopelessly out of her league. She doesn't have any idea of what to do with the character. In her own movie, Cherie ends up being a big unsympathetic blah – and this is probably pretty close to what Lita Ford thought of her. I guess they don't teach techniques like Projection and Communication in Hollywood acting schools anymore.
Michael Shannon plays Fowley as if he were the Mad Hatter in a Batman episode, except not as terrifying. Sigismondi obviously needed to create a Hollywood villain and pegged the stencil on Fowley. What she and Shannon fail to understand is that villains don't think they are villains. If an actor plays Richard The Third believing he is a Bad Guy what audience wants to sink their teeth into a moldy stereotype like that? It's not just historically incorrect, it's boring.
Hopefully the movie industry will never get interested in pimping The Shaggs story – a far more talented band and one that had a much deeper impact on rock'n'roll than Joan Jett and the Runaways ever dreamed. If you want to see a good movie about The Runaways check out "The Fabulous Stains". It's more accurate and contains authentically scurrilous rock'n'roll aberrations.