The Runaways reviews

A couple of the Runaways reviews:

HitFix.com
It’s hard to believe that 35 years ago a girl with a guitar was a scandalous thing. If nothing else, “The Runaways” provides a little historical perspective on a time not so long ago when aggressive axe-wielding female musicians were seen as a threat to their male counterparts. But instead of celebrating the Runaways’ pioneering achievements and influence, the movie comes across as a cautionary tale about what happens when teenage girls run wild.

“The Runaways,” which centers on the relationship between Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) and lead singer Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), premiered at Sundance Sunday night, but with Apparition already signed on as distributor, the movie played here mainly to drum up excitement prior to its March 19 wide release.
The film does a masterful job of showing how the band, which started as five questionably talented outcasts in Los Angeles with ambitions that far outweighed their abilities, zoomed to stardom on a bullet train steered by producer/manager Kim Fowley.Even at the group’s height, the Runaways’ passion, verve and raw appeal surpassed its talent (with the possible exception of guitarist Lita Ford, who did not cooperate with the making of the movie). Cult hit “Cherry Bomb,” written on the fly as an audition piece for Currie if the movie is to be believed, was all tease and come ons strung together with simple rhymes and a few chord changes in the best tradition of punk.

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The Hollywood Reporter:
The Runaways -- Film Review
Bottom Line: A quick-silver, impressionistic account of the swift rise and long, steep fall of rock's first all-girl band.
By Kirk Honeycutt
Jan 25, 2010, 01:29 PM ET
More Sundance reviews

PARK CITY -- "The Runaways" bursts with energy, youth, excess, female empowerment, sex, drug and rock 'n' roll. It's an instant hit worldwide with its cast of young stars, but is it any good? Surprisingly, yes. It just must be met on its own terms. While neither a biopic nor a concert film about the famous/infamous 1970s all-female band the Runaways, the film does prefer music and bad behavior to insight, character or substance. First-time director Floria Sigismondi, whose background is in photography and video, surfs along the surface of the '70s rock scene in Los Angeles and, weirdly, Tokyo, to scoop up photo ops, sound bites and glimpses of a hardcore lifestyle. The vigor and pace is electric, and the movie features three showy performances by Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning and Michael Shannon.

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IFC.com
Fanning, Stewart grow up fast in "The Runaways," if not unpredictably.
By Sam Adams on 01/25/2010
Filed under: Reviews
Reviewed at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

Coming-of-age movies are Sundance's stock in trade, but few announce themselves as boldly, and broadly, as "The Runaways," whose first shot is a splotch of menstrual blood hitting the pavement. Said splotch emanates from Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), a suburban California teenager with a burgeoning David Bowie obsession and a surly sensuality just beginning to bloom.

Teenage sexuality has always been the wellspring of rock and roll, but the Runaways made themselves the aggressors, concocting an unstable mixture of empowerment and exploitation. Floria Sigismondi, who directed music videos for Marilyn Manson, Christina Aguilera and the White Stripes, has the story's girl-power framework well in hand. But in spite of that opening drop, the movie's evocation of the Runaways' rise and fall is short on the juices that make for great, trashy, disreputable rock. She crams Fanning into Currie's famous corset, and stages a passionate kiss between Currie and Jett before compressing their romantic relationship into a single softcore montage, but the movie is too tasteful and glossy to thoroughly embody the Runaways' quasi-pedophiliac appeal.

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EW.com:
Sundance: Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning rock out in 'The Runaways,' but the movie itself is no knockout
by Owen Gleiberman
Categories: Dakota Fanning, Kristen Stewart, Sundance Film Festival 2010, The Runaways

From the moment I arrived at Sundance, the movie that more or less everyone, including me, wanted to see most was The Runaways — and not just because it offered the chance to see whether Kristen Stewart, as Joan Jett, could leave her swoony Twilight mopiness behind her and play a rock & roll princess with down-and-dirty spunk. (Verdict: She can.) It’s also because the Runaways, a packaged group of choppy-haired teen-glam feline punkettes from L.A. who, in 1976, did for girls playing power chords what the Sex Pistols did for beer-spewing anarchy, may seem cooler now than they did then. In hindsight, they blazed quite a trail, but they didn’t have many good songs — and even their best one, “Cherry Bomb,” never quite broke free of their jailbait novelty-act image.
The most entertaining thing about the movie is that its writer-director, music-video veteran Floria Sigismondi (making her feature debut), has a sixth sense for how the Runaways were an image first and a rock & roll band second. Early on, we see Stewart’s black-shag-haired Joan in an L.A. boutique, where she has to coerce the sales woman into selling her a man’s studded biker jacket, which she wears as if born to it. Stewart’s no-frills, casually likable performance begins with Jett’s distinctive tough-girl saunter — which is to say, the actress knows just how to walk like a skinny dude. At the same time, we meet Cherie Currie (first name pronounced Sher-ee), who chops her platinum-blonde mane into a David Bowie shag, paints on the facial lightning streak from his Aladdin Sane cover, and lip-syncs to him at a high school talent show, which results in her being pelted with wads of paper.

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Collider.com:
THE RUNAWAYS Movie Review - Sundance 2010
by Steve 'Frosty' Weintraub Posted:January 24th, 2010 at 7:00 pm



With fantastic performances from Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning and Michael Shannon, The Runaways delivered the goods at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Based on the book Neon Angel: The Cherie Currie Story by Cherie Currie, The Runaways tells the coming-of-age story of the teenage rock band The Runaways and how they came together in the mid 1970’s. Kristen Stewart stars as Joan Jett, Dakota Fanning is Cherie Currie, and Michael Shannon stars as the über-eccentric Kim Fowley - the man who put The Runaways together.

While there was a lot of debate if the film would show a no-holds-barred account of what The Runaways really went through back in the 70’s - like the drug use and the in-band make-out sessions - not only does the film show a warts-and-all look at what happened to the band - at times you’ll feel like you’re watching documentary footage from the era as Stewart and Fanning are really playing and singing in the film, and they both deliver inspired performances. For more of my thoughts on the film, hit the jump:

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Cinematical:
Sundance Review: The Runaways
by Kevin Kelly Jan 24th 2010 // 9:02PM
Filed under: Drama, Music & Musicals, Sundance, Theatrical Reviews


I'll be blunt about this: I really wasn't looking forward to this movie. I'm not the biggest fan of lip-chewing, hair-twirling Kristen Stewart, or the wide-eyed, blank face expert Dakota Fanning. I love rock and roll (so put another dime in the jukebox, baby) as much as the next person, but these two starring in a movie about an all-girl, teen sensation, flash in the pan band from the 1970s? I just didn't think they could pull it off. Hey, at least I'm big enough to admit I was wrong. The Runaways rocked the Joan Jett / Cherie Currie backstory's pants off (literally), and I'll be buying the soundtrack, which features K-Stew and D-Fan singing the blasts from the past.

However, this movie really should have been called The Joan Jett & Cherie Currie Show, because the other Runaways are hardly featured in this movie at all. Sandy West (who co-founded the band with Joan Jett), and Lita Ford's stories aren't given much attention in the film, and Ford seems to exist just to cause drama. Additionally, The Runaways had six different bass players during their short four-year history (including Micki Steele who went on to The Bangles) so the filmmakers decided to create a fictional girl named Robin Robins. She's played by Alia Shawkat of Arrested Development fame, and she unfortunately gets only one or two lines.

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Dark Horizons:
Sundance Review: "The Runaways"

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By Paul Fischer Sunday January 24th 2010 10:05PM

The perfect Sundance film is "The Runaways", a film that is both provocative and haunting, a film that captures the mid-seventies with clarity and that beautifully explores the fascinating world of teen girl band The Runaways, fleetingly big at a time of social unrest.

The movie focuses on the often turbulent and protective relationship between guitarist/vocalist Joan Jett and lead vocalist Cherie Currie as they navigate a rocky road of touring and record-label dramas. The film beautifully chronicles the band's formation as well as their meteoric rise under the pervasive eye of an abusive manager.

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MTV movies blog about Welcome to The Rileys:
Sundance Review: Kristen Stewart's 'Welcome To The Rileys'
Posted 13 hrs ago by Eric Ditzian in Reviews, Sundance 2010
Kristen Stewart is utterly fearless in "Welcome to the Rileys." That's the takeaway from the film's world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday afternoon. You can quibble all you want with her portrayal of a 16-year-old runaway turned stripper and prostitute. But you cannot walk away from a viewing and say the actress doesn't fearlessly expose herself physically and emotionally, and doesn't do so with astonishing maturity and believability.

Working the lap dance rooms and seedy motels of New Orleans, Stewart's character (real name Allison, working girl name Mallory and many others) is a damaged runaway with a filthy mouth and an even filthier idea of how to make money. There is little sexy about this teen, as she's prayed on by faceless men; the camera catches every pimple, every dark circle under her eye, every strand of stringy hair that has seen far too much strip club cigarette smoke and not enough shampoo (and no, she does not once get naked). Her life is going nowhere until a plumbing supply salesman named Doug Reily (James Gandolfini) shows up and takes Allison under his wing.

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