THE RUNAWAYS
3 out of 5 stars

this was better than i expected it to be! (or at least expected from the trailer) the whole movie feels like one long music video...figures as it was directed by floria sigismondi, famed italian music video director! plus, the rockin' soundtrack of the runaways and joan jett really make it worthwhile! ;)


kristen stewart chops up her hair into the signature joan jett haircut to play the bad-ass joan jett. but we are first introduced to cherie currie (dakota fanning), who later becomes the lead singer of the runaways. cherie is this david bowie lovin' brigitte bardot lookin' 16 year old girl, and immediately gets picked up by record producer kim fowley (michael shannon- doing a pretty good job as one) at the local hipster club. but it wasn't cherie nor kim who came up with the idea of an all-girl rock band. it was actually joan... BEST scene is when joan and kim are figuring out the music/lyrics to cherry bomb with cherie listening in outside their trailer rehearsal "studio". so, the runaways rocket to stardom (esp. in japan), but drugs obviously get in the way. hey, it was the 70s! (and these girls were musicians!)

i know this movie is based on the book cherie currie wrote, but honestly, i would have liked it to have have joan be the center of attention! usually kristen stewart is considered the kiss of death to all her movies, but she was actually the better actress than dakota... both are equally depicted in the movie, but joan jett seemed to have more to her life story than cherie... like i said, the soundtrack is AWESOME and the scenes using said songs are well presented. pretty good for a biopic! (of course, not as great as ray though!)

p.s. do we know of any more biopics coming out soon? it's always great to see hollywood-ized versions of musician lives... ;)