The Runaways

Director: Floria Sigismondi
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning, Michael Shannon
Time Out rating:

Wasn’t it only yesterday that Dakota Fanning shrieked her way into your splitting headache in War of the Worlds? She was just 11 back then, and in this fast-and-loose dramatization of the flameout of the 1970s proto-grrrl group, she’s all of 15. Fanning’s co-star, vamp bait Kristen Stewart, isn’t that much more experienced (she can vote). The two make for an uncomfortably tarted-up frontline as, respectively, blond yowler Cherie Currie and future-bad-reputation-disregarder Joan Jett. It’s exactly as it should be; the band’s story is a cautionary one. So if you feel yourself getting protective, the movie is doing its job.

The two underage characters meet, naturally, in a bar over drinks, shoved together by creepy L.A. entrepreneur Kim Fowley (Revolutionary Road’s Shannon, the only truly anarchic presence in the whole film). Soon enough, they’re crammed into a motor home with the rest of the band, working on chord ch-ch-changes and sliding inexorably toward drugs, soft-core lesbian sex and Japanese fame. As styled by video director Floria Sigismondi, the film mainly glances on these surfaces - it’s more giggly goofy than coke-in-the-bathroom naughty (only vinyl collectors will insist that a serious legacy has been sullied; the plot is as contrived as the group itself).

So you don’t blink an eye when the prefab wheels run off the rails - there’s very little pathos here for something presumably informed by Currie’s 1989 memoir. Still, you do get a sense of the moment when glam was being fought out in American high schools, and teen sex was barely contained in tight pants. There’s lots of volume in these tunes - the soundtrack is killer - and at least everyone gets their rocks off.

The Runaways opens in Tokyo on March 12