Isn’t there a small bit of irony in the closing credits to The Runaways, with Joan Jett singing about how she doesn’t give a damn about her reputation just as her credit as the film’s producer appears onscreen? Not that Jett isn’t entitled to tell her own story, but if she really had so little regard for her reputation, she’d have let her sleazeball former producer Kim Fowley control this movie. As portrayed in the film by Michael Shannon, he’s a pockmarked glam giant — part Mick Jagger, part Beef from Phantom of the Paradise, his head touching the ceiling of the tiny trailer The Runaways use as their rehearsal space. Here’s where Fowley turns a bunch of sexy, young, moderately talented musicians and singers into rock goddesses, screaming aphorisms at them like “This isn’t women’s lib, it’s women’s libido!” and “This is press, not prestige!” In the most entertaining scene, he prepares them to deal with hecklers by inviting a bunch of boys into the trailer, who then pelt them with beer cans and dog turds. Fowley may be a creep, but he’s a creep of genius — and maybe only someone so unashamedly in touch with his own seamy desires would have realized how much money could be made off a band of hot underage girls singing about sex. There were five girls in The Runaways, but the film is really only interested in two of them: Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart), the sullen rebel with the leather jacket, the Suzi Quatro hairdo, and the stronger survival instinct; and Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), the tragic 15-year-old lead singer with the feathered blonde hair and the increasingly skimpy outfits. If Joan Jett’s attitude was “fuck you,” Cherie Currie’s was “fuck me,” the combination — assisted by some pretty irresistible pop-punk melodies, especially the exultant “Cherry Bomb,” with that imitation David Bowie ch-ch-ch stutter in the chorus — was pretty irresistible, until Currie’s drug habit and the usual feuds, jealousies, and sheer road fatigue caused the group to disband after just three wild years. (The film’s lack of interest in the other Runaways almost becomes a running joke — I’m not sure Alia Shawkat, who plays a fictional stand-in for bassist Jackie Fox, even gets a single line of dialogue.)
Writer/director Floria Sigismondi’s recreation of the 1970s Los Angeles rock world — land of cocaine, black sneakers on concrete, and Rodney Bingenheimer — has a lot of texture, and there’s a good energy to the scenes of The Runaways performing their hits before more and more crazed audiences. The film begins with a close-up of a drop of Cherie Currie’s menstrual blood hitting the L.A. sidewalk, and you can sense the cigarette stink on the girls’ unwashed clothes in every scene. At the same time, she is surprisingly circumspect on the question of how much sex The Runaways were actually having during this period of their lives — watching this film, you’d think that, apart from the drug use, the wildest thing Jett and Currie did was pee on some rival musicians’ guitars and pose for some provocative photos.
Stewart does a serviceable job as Joan Jett (although her guitar-playing is less than convincing) and Fanning is quite good as Currie, especially in the section of the film where Currie kind of gets intoxicated by her own sexuality and begins wearing little more than lingerie as her stage costume. At the same time, as preparation for The Runaways, I watched Lou Adler’s 1982 proto-riot-grrrl film Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains earlier in the evening, and I have to say, neither Stewart nor Fanning have anything on Diane Lane in that movie for sheer screen presence.
As nihilistic punk-rocker Corinne “Third Degree” Burns, Lane is just ferocious, turning her pretty, pubescent face into a blank mask of amoral aggression. The film seems unsure of what to make of her — is she a role model for independent, rebellious, angry teen girls everywhere, or an ambitious monster who manipulates and steals from everybody around her in her climb to the top? But that confusion kind of works in the film’s favour — our opinion of Corinne remains unstable, her motivations obscure, her inner thoughts perpetually unknowable. She’s at once completely untalented and a natural star, an enemy of the music industry and a genius at marketing herself, a hero to thousands of disaffected girls who turns into their enemy in the space of a couple of minutes.Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains is in many ways an inept film, unsure of its own message and apparently missing several scenes. But in its fictionalized way, it captures the energy of The Runaways in a way that The Runaways never quite manages. At one point, we see tiny, teenaged Diane Lane sitting in her dressing room sitting on a chair, looking up at British punk-rocker Ray Winstone. Lane may not be as talented as Winstone, but she’s already more popular than him, and even he realizes that she’s tapped into the essence of punk in a way his band never will. “I’m everything you want to be,” she says, and Winstone has no response. There is none. She’s right. Deep down, every punk rocker who sees Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains knows they’d give their right arm to be that teenaged girl sitting there in her underwear, telling Ray Winstone how great she is.
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