The Runaways (2010)
Directed by Floria Sigismondi
Joan Jett and Cherie Currie, two rebellious teenagers from Southern California, become the frontwomen for The Runaways -- the now-legendary group that paved the way for future generations of female rockers. Under the Svengali-like influence of impresario Kim Fowley, the band becomes a huge success.
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6 films that influenced The Runaways
What critics say influenced The Runaways
The sidewalk is on Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip, the blood is menstrual – perhaps a nod to Brian De Palma’s crypto-feminist horror movie Carrie.
Not since Brian De Palma's "Carrie" do I recall a movie about teenage girls starting with such an overt depiction of the outset of puberty.
Cherie serves as your guide into this raucous other-world, the distaff version of Patrick Fugit in Almost Famous—surprised, sullied, and eventually educated.
Based on Currie's book and told from her point of view, "The Runaways" is "Almost Famous" from the band's perspective, and with Fanning's Currie walking in the platform shoes of that film's groupie, Penny Lane.
Still, more than any movie since "Almost Famous," "The Runaways" captures the intoxicating power of rock-and-roll music to transform young lives — to lift teenage nobodies up into the clouds of stardom (and then, more often than not, dump them back down into the real world they had dreamed of escaping).
Such films as The Doors, Ray, Sid and Nancy, Walk the Line, and What's Love Got to Do With It share the hazy spotlight with films existing on the perimeter, like Almost Famous and last year's Taking Woodstock.
Fanning, whose wide-eyed, sun-kissed innocence recalls Kate Hudson's breakout performance in "Almost Famous," teeters as if on Currie's own vertiginous platform heels between little girl and grown-up, in a role that often demands seeing Currie as both simultaneously.
While Cameron Crowe’s autobiographical love song to the period, Almost Famous, waxes poetic on the music and the muse from a journalist/fan’s perspective, The Runaways plays as fast and loose with the band’s biography as it does the camera.
The film gets better as it goes along; in terms of pure giggle-inducing brio, it recalls Amy Heckerling’s Valley Girl comedy Clueless, an update of a classic (Jane Austen’s Emma) that is now a classic in its own right.
The film gets better as it goes along; in terms of pure giggle-inducing brio, it recalls Amy Heckerling’s Valley Girl comedy Clueless, an update of a classic (Jane Austen’s Emma) that is now a classic in its own right.
The sensibility toward teenage interests and idiosyncrasies matches Richard Linklater’s ode, Dazed and Confused, but as the band careens toward fame, Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine (vaguely biographing David Bowie) becomes the inspiration—an enraged Jett smashing a bottle and pounding the window of the studio control room.
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The film gets better as it goes along; in terms of pure giggle-inducing brio, it recalls Amy Heckerling’s Valley Girl comedy Clueless, an update of a classic (Jane Austen’s Emma) that is now a classic in its own right.
Taking her visual cues from Oliver Stone’s The Doors as well as Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen, Sigismondi gives the movie a nervous energy that fits both the time period and the characters’ state of mind.