Grrrls just want to have fun
Few scenes in The Runaways — the biopic about Joan Jett, Cherie Currie and the erstwhile all-girl band of the title — rock quite as much as the one in which Jett (played by Twilight nymphet Kristen Stewart) gets her revenge on an opening act in some off-the-road club by sneaking into the guys’ dressing room and peeing on their guitars.
It just says it all: young girls, put down by chauvinist, sexist men, learn to use their own weapons against the c*ck rockers. Did it actually happen? Who knows? Most of The Runaways is lifted from Cherie Currie’s memoir, Neon Angel, though Jett herself is a producer of the movie. And admittedly, Jett and Currie, the two characters fronting The Runaways — a ragtag LA ensemble of adolescents who worshiped Bowie, Iggy and Suzi Quatro — were consuming various drugs during those days. So their memories might be a bit hazy.
Currie (played by Dakota Fanning) starts out as a shy but determined Bowie fan in 1975, lip-syncing to Lady Grinning Soul at her high school talent show. She is met with showers of debris, to which she responds with the classic punk rock gesture: two raised middle fingers.
With an alcoholic dad, a jealous sis and an absentee mom (off with stepdad in Indonesia), she’s ripe for rebellion. So is Joan Jett (nee Joan Larkin), a leather-obsessed tough chick who won’t sit still for playing On Top of Old Smokey on acoustic guitar. She just wants to rock!
She spots Kim Fowley, a bubblegum producer/songwriter, outside an LA club. He’s looking for a punk band to Svengali. Jett’s selling point: “I want an all-girl band.”
Fowley (played with bizarre relish by Michael Shannon) not only assembles the band — spotting Currie in a club and saying she has “the look” — but puts them through rock boot camp. He berates them for not sounding enough “like men.” He hires kids to gather boxes of crumpled tin cans and rocks to throw at the band while they rehearse (the girls get good at swatting away debris with their headstocks). And despite being an ego-crazed cartoon character, Fowley is actually the closest thing to a functional male in the movie. Every other guy is a wuss, a drunkard or a domineering old fart who just doesn’t “get” that girls can rock. They’re the kind of guys who populated Thelma and Louise, mostly, and their various failings conveniently make The Runaways stand out in high, sexy relief. The girls are best when taking the stage, kicking out Cherry Bomb (their “controversial” first single; after all, the girls were all underage) and other early Riot Grrl anthems.
Where would rock be without The Runaways? I’d always considered them more or less a footnote in rock history, but a thousand girl punk bands later — from Shonen Knife to L7 and beyond — their plucky singles still pack major cajones. A shambolic cover of the Velvets’ Rock and Roll here, a thudding anthem like Saturday Night Special there, and it’s clear The Runaways were never going to be confused with The Monkees. (Check out their “live in Japan” stuff on YouTube.) Drummer Sandy West is rock solid, Jett chugs along on dirty rhythm guitar (her model was Keith Richards), and future metal goddess Lita Ford does the pentatonic scale thing with authority. A mere year later would be the Sex Pistols, and one can hear the low guitar growl that would ignite Steve Jones, the stuttering vocals that could have birthed Johnny Rotten in The Runaways’ live performances.
Currie, whatever her diva leanings, was a thriller onstage, pouting out the lines “Hello, Dad, hello, mom, I’m your cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-cha-cherry bomb” with eyebrow-lifted irony when she wasn’t snarling out her vocals. Played by Fanning, she’s a bit too wispy most of the time to convince us she means business. She has her “dramatic stretch” moment — cowering in a phone booth, mascara running, crying to her sister to come pick her up. (There is a lot of makeup in this movie, in various stages of construction and devastation. It could almost have been called The Rise and Fall of Revlon.)
Stewart, as Jett, is tougher, whether smoking a cigarette, mumbling her lines or brooding with her head downward. (When she descends on Currie for their first blissed-out kiss, we know immediately who the guy is in that relationship. Or is that sexist?) Stewart has the shag haircut and the makeup, but she’s not entirely convincing as a rock chick, either. The fact is, only a bunch of unknowns — without Hollywood credentials and boundaries — could have really played these angry young girls with proper conviction. Then, their performances would have been as unlikely a hit as The Runaways themselves, doing national tours with Cheap Trick, Van Halen, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers just before punk broke.
As a dramatic arc, woman screenwriter Floria Sigismondi has the band reach Beatlemania-level fame in Japan, gain punk credibility and then immediately implode as Currie descends into drugs and personal demons. (We learn from an epilogue that she now is doing “chainsaw art” in California and counseling teens on drug abuse.) Joan Jett, we see by the end, is ready to launch phase two of her rock career, developing her own personal snarling vocals and having a lucrative run with The Blackhearts. And though the movie failed to mention it, she was one of the first women to launch her own recording label, Blackheart Records, after her first solo record was rejected by 23 major labels. It goes to show that in the rock business, you have to have brains, balls of steel and, at times, a black heart.
