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Review

The best thing about The Runaways is that it's a movie about The Runaways. This is no small accomplishment, as those teenage girl punks were, in fact, quite radical and pretty damn awesome. But, sadly enough, this biopic from writer-director Floria Sigismondi offers very little insight into either the deeper psychological underpinnings of these troubled rock-obsessed teens or the complicated social implications of their hyper-sexed feminism. Sure, viewers will come away with the understanding that Cherie Currie (played semi-adequately by Dakota Fanning) was driven to drug use and self-destruction by a combination of her troubled upbringing and her discomfort with being a teenage sex symbol. But, considering the film's seemingly endless running time (it actually clocks in at 1 hr 46 min but feels much longer) it seems a very superficial revelation. Joan Jett (Twilight's Kristen Stewart) is even less developed. What we learn from this pic (which the real Jett executive produced) is that she was a young gitl who just wanted to rock whose dreams were either squashed by oppressive males who told her that "girls don't play electric guitar" or perverted by sleazy record producers (Michael Shannon as Kim Fowley has drawn rave reviews for his performance which is menacing and charismatic but also feels lifted from "Rock Biopics for Dummies"). The other members of the band? They hardly register, which makes sense since some refused to cooperate and between the fact that it was Cherie Currie's book on which the film was based and Jett executive producing. But, really all we can tell you about the rest of the band based on this movie is that Lita Ford didn't like Cherie Currie very much... at least not once the band got famous.

The problem with this music biopic (and nearly every other music biopic ever made) is that there's virtually no way for actors (even admittedly good ones like Dakota Fanning) to match the charisma of the rock stars they are portraying. Fanning does her best and some of the singing isn't half-bad... for an actor. But the wow factor never surfaces—leaving audiences to grasp at psychological details or, at the very least, the sordid fun of the rockstar life. Well, there are some sordid details: Jett teaching a bandmate to masturbate in the shower, Jett and Currie exploring lesbian sex and a whole lotta drug use. But none of this comes across as particularly fun or revelatory. It just seems like every other rock biopic ever made... which gets very, very boring after a while. Overall, The Runaways seems like a story that was just begging to be told. Hopefully, someday, someone will do it right.

 -- Daniel Reed