The Thousands

The Runaways is startlingly textural: sunbleached California light; squalid, dim interiors; juicy, glossy satin and eyeshadow. And it dramatises the central ironies of its eponymous ’70s all-girl band. Singer Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) and guitarist/songwriter Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) believed in rock’s freedom and subversion, but were exploited for their youthful sexuality. Likewise, Floria Sigismondi’s ambivalent film celebrates feminine toughness, but also glories uncomfortably in jailbait lesbo antics.

Scripted by Sigismondi from Currie’s memoir, Neon Angel, it focuses on Currie and Jett. Both Fanning and Stewart are excellent, uncannily playing on their public personas: Stewart’s inarticulate sullenness and Fanning’s child-star eagerness to please. As the Runaways’ truly appalling producer Kim Fowley, Michael Shannon reminded me of a potty-mouthed, misogynistic Mark Holden. “I was gonna form a band of dwarves,” he tells a Mercury Records exec, “but their hands were too small. They couldn’t hold their instruments.”

As a rise-and-fall rock pic, The Runaways is unexceptional. But it’s a winning meditation on that excitingly liminal era as glam gave way to punk. Both genres offered their fans ways to break away from the mundane, and The Runaways is a gorgeous cautionary tale about the limits of such transformative fantasies.