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'Runaways' rocks and rolls

Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning play a rock-star duo.

By Thomas Leonard

Published April 30, 2010

The '70s teen girl rock group The Runaways came on the scene loud, raucous and out for blood. This rocker of a film is no different, announcing the birth of women on the verge with the same rebel yell. There's hard rock music blaring when a streetwalking wild child gets her first visit from Aunt Flo on the streets of 1975 L.A.: It's child star Dakota Fanning, 16 years old and all grown up.

The graphic opening is a ceremonious coming-of-age moment for ex-child star Fanning, leaving her kiddie-fare days behind to play Cherie Currie, the jailbait sexpot 15-year-old front woman of The Runaways. She's joined by fellow teen dream Kristen Stewart, playing the unequivocal leather-studded badass Joan Jett.

"The Runaways" is less of a historically accurate biopic and more of a hard rock coming-of-age tale.

Currie lives with an alcoholic father and neglectful mother. She lives in quiet desperation and cuts her hair to look just like David Bowie.

Jett is a bold street punk exploring drugs, women and the electric guitar.

The two meet sleazy record producer Kim Fowley (the extravagant Michael Shannon) at a dumpy disco-punk bar on the Sunset Strip. Jett says she wants to start an all-girl hard rock band, and Fowley perceives the lucrative novelty as the next big thing.

They round up a drummer and bassist and start practicing in a Valley trailer, and the next half hour is a loud, rollicking good time. The girls run amuck around the Hollywood sign, learn how to deflect beer cans in a "heckle drill" and write the rocker "Cherry Bomb." It's a genuine good time, with fun music and a freewheeling young energy exerted by Fanning and Stewart.

Not soon after the movie explodes like dynamite, it gets muddled in its own missteps. Jett wants to liberate women's rock and roll, but Fowley sees otherwise: He tells the girls, "It's not about women's lib, it's about women's libido!" His foul-mouthed misogyny, though accurate, is an uncomfortable obstruction to the film's good time. He slings every obscenity about female genitalia at the budding teens, making it impossible to rally behind the girl power message.

Fowley's inappropriate behavior becomes the least of the girls' problems once the band blows up and tours in Japan, where Currie picks up multiple drug addictions and ignores pleas from her sister begging her to come home and help their sick dad. The movie hits a snag when it doesn't seem to know how to take itself seriously. Currie's drug problem gets treated like an after school special.

Even when the writing gets cringe-worthy, Fanning pulls out a performance worth noticing. She plays the awkwardness and self-righteousness of teen girlhood with such self-awareness it's hard to believe she is only 16 herself. Stewart also holds her own, making her dreadful performances in the "Twilight" series seem like a fluke. She embodies the raw livewire of '70s Jett with believable ease.

The girls' fierce dedication (both do their own singing) isn't enough to hold the sloppy second half together. It's unfortunate, considering the unapologetically rowdy first act is a real firecracker — an explosively hedonistic good time you can't help but tap your toes to. It's pure hard rock, or at least as close as you'll get in a movie theater.