Movie Review: The Runaways

There's nothing better than a girls' night out.  To me this is about getting some of my friends together and bonding, usually over cocktails and food.  Nothing completes a girls' night out like a good old fashioned chick flick.  By "chick flick" I mean any movie that targets women as its main audience, be it romantic comedy, period piece or vampire drama.  It reminds us what it was to be an awkward teen, a girl hopelessly in love and about the experiences that helped us become the women we are now.  When The Runaways hit the theaters, I knew it was time to schedule a night out.

If you aren't familiar with them, The Runaways were a short-lived all-girl rock band that came from California in the 1970s.  At the time, between glam and punk, girls playing rock was something of a curiosity.  There were other female rock bands (Heart and the Slits come to mind), but The Runaways captured energy of the era.  They were young (teenagers), sexy and angry.  Perhaps not the most influential of bands, their song "Cherry Bomb" remains a girl-rock anthem, and some of the founding members went on to lead iconic careers - Joan Jett, Lita Ford and Micki Steele (of the Bangles).  The Runaways were however, a blip on the screen at this time of musical revolution.  Like a summer romance, they came and went fast and furious.

The movie itself focuses on two of the band members, Joan Jett the guitarist and songwriter and Cherie Curie, the lead singer.  Each girl, is depicted as trying to find herself and stand out as a teen.  Cherie (played by Dakota Fanning), a Bowie fan embraces the theatricality and glitter of performance.  Joan Jett (Kristin Stewart) dances along the line of androgyny while she defines what it means to be a female rockstar.  They come together with the help of Kim Folwer, their Manager.  As the group takes shape, the girls in the band grow together and come of age.  Surviving your teenage years is hard enough without the added stresses of touring.  As they find excesses in drugs, sex and fame, they begin to question who they are and what they want out of life.  

Sound like a familiar story?  Well, I'm not going to tell say you haven't heard it before.   It follows the typical career arc of the rockstar.  Perhaps the story is  cliche, and perhaps it's because the lifestyle itself is cliche.   You aren't going to find any life lessons in this movie.  What you will find is solid entertainment, which seems fitting for the band.  The Runaways really weren't teaching any lessons.  They were a bunch of teenage girls playing music and having fun; so it wouldn't be fair to expect more from the biopic.  The girls are adorable, the costumes are gorgeous and the performances do rock.  I found particularly endearing the delicate handling of the girls finding their own sexuality.  The backdrop of the movie, the music scene of 1977 Los Angeles was particularly well done.

Walking out of the theater, my friends and I laughed, commiserated about bad fashion choices we made in our teens and talked about the firs time we heard the song "Cherry Bomb."  We had fun a lot of fun, so the night was successful.