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Great Film overall

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Does this film tell the whole story of the band The Runaways? No! Of course it doesn't. How can a film tell the whole story in one hour and forty minutes? When it comes to any film based on real events, whether it's Gandhi, Braveheart, Ray, etc, people have some very naive expectations concerning accuracy and truth. But any film based on nonfictional material is not a recreation of events. It's a representation of events. You're not watching a story. You're watching a summary. Many would tell you that this is Cherie Currie's summary and therefore a movie about her and not The Runaways. Because that is the case, doubts are aplenty not only about the accuracy but the integrity of this film. If by some miracle, there were four more movies made, each from the perspective of a different Runaway, the accuracy and credibility of each one would be challenged by passionate fans, moviegoers and those who were actually there.What you get with this film is a thoughtful and captivating look into the era. It was a time when rock n' roll was still dangerous and a girl who wanted to play electric had a lot to prove. With Dakota Fanning's portrayal of Cherie Currie, you get a compelling performance where fragility and innocence mixes with angst and anger. Just like that cherry-shaped firecracker, Dakota can appear sweet and harmless. But if she feels the heat, she could easily be the bomb that blows up in your face. Kristen Stewart's portrayal of Joan Jett is a glimpse of iconic individuality in the face of sexist adversity. And when you think the performance might be veering towards one dimensional monotony, you see her start to crack. When an argument in the studio turns destructive and friendships deteriorate, Kristen's Joan betrays a vulnerability that is damn near heart-breaking. Michael Shannon threatens to steal the whole movie as he gives a larger than life portrayal of larger than life producer Kim Fowley. The character represents everything that is exciting, immoral and ultimately detrimental in the world these girls find themselves in. Any film dealing with the familiar rock n' roll archetypes of sex, drugs and losing it all is bound to be at risk of floundering in clichés. These may be apparent, but only the insufferable cynics will let them get in the way of the truth. And this film does tell the truth. When these girls are on stage, the music, mind, body and soul are in perfect alignment. In those moments they are the most familial, the most powerful and they are so beautifully dangerous that nobody can doubt their strength. It is the purest high that they could ever achieve. The problems arise when the music stops. They walk off stage and they have to deal with family, love, friendships and future. The most obvious way to escape it all is to try and recreate the high. For many a rock star, the answer is never far and for Cherie Currie, the answer was only a pill away. But in the end, the only high that matters is the music because the music is what everyone remembers. If you're looking for the truth in this movie, there it is.

Up until the Runaways hit the scene, women's rock and roll were limited to some random women in rock bands. The Runaways were the first group to change all that by having an all-women group. This is the second film to address this band. Both films should be watched and then remember that history is always revised in Media. When I watched the extras on the DVD I found out this story focus was on -Kristen Stewart Kristen Stewart ... Joan Jett Dakota Fanning .. Cherie Currie Joan Jett and Cherie Currie were consultants on this film and so the story is limited by their point of view. Other than that limit I have no complaints about what the film tries to do. Women in Rock and Roll prior to the band I can recall were a member of The Honeycomb who sang the song "Have I The Right" in the early 1960's and a woman drummer with The First Edition ( song -Just In Time). Kenny Rogers was the lead singer of The First Edition. Since neither of these counts as really hard rock, they were just token women who tried to break the barrier

Well, I completed my homework assignment of watching The Runaways. Can I go out and play now?The objective of the task a friend gave me was to see a different side of Kristen Stewart since I thought I hadn't see a movie with her in it yet – outside the Twilight series, that is. Turns out, yeah, I did see Jumper and Into the Wild, but I do not recall her in those. Here…you'd be blind not to notice her even while she's fairly mellow. As always, it appears.Now, I'm not a Joan Jett fan, though I do enjoy her music when it comes on. I'm so ignorant on the topic of her past or present, I thought it was just her and some backup chicks. I didn't know anything about "The Runaways" band, nor the sequel: "Joan Jett and the Blackhearts." (I guess I was right on my thoughts for that one.)Well, despite my ignorance and the fact this movie really wasn't about Joan, I enjoyed the ride of the girls wanting to develop a band from virtually nothing into sexy stardom. And they didn't waste any time jumping right into the destructive drug usage.Perhaps this movie was accurate, because not only was Joan Jett one of the major producers, she apparently was on set all the time pointing out the accuracies. If this is true, and I have no reason to suspect otherwise, it was a pretty dull ride with so little happening, the movie seemed to be stretched out as far as it could to make this a feature length. Again, that's not to say I didn't enjoy it, but it wasn't the most "explosive" biography I've seen. (In fact, the original poster's tagline was: "It's 1975 and they're about to explode." Hardly.)But, it did have fairly decent acting all around with, surprisingly the best performance in a movie about an all-girl band was Michael Shannon as Kim Fowley. He was sure out there, but I thought he was above the rest. And the rest wasn't that bad: the two leads, Stewart as Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie were very good…at looking melancholy all the time. Sure, that, again, might be accurate; these real life ladies might have been a bit of a couple of downers. I did believe in their performances, but they didn't grab me to care one way or another where they ended up.The soundtrack, of course, was killer and the decades old scenery believable. I would recommend this movie of the (sorta) rise, (sorta) fall and (sorta) reinvention of an all (sorta) kickass girls band – they really didn't see that badass, by the way.And, yeah, it was nice to see some range out of Stewart, even though in the two big rolls I've seen her in were sorrowful and downhearted rolls.

Though it's named after and supposedly about the groundbreaking all-girl rock band of the 1970s, a more accurate title and description of this film would be "The Rise and Fall of Cherie Currie, guest starring Joan Jett and with a special appearance by Kim Fowley". They just took the story Currie wrote in her book about her life, sandwiched in some stuff with Jett and let Michael Shannon tear the scenery apart with his bare teeth. If you wanted to look back through the decades and know who The Runaways were and why they were important, this movie will only give you a glimmer of a clue. Maybe they were so much of their moment that you can't really appreciate them if you weren't there at the time. The fact remains this motion picture doesn't tell you anything you can't see on any one of a hundred "Behind the Music" shows on VH-1.With that, however, The Runaways is still a satisfactory little flick. Kristen Stewart is great, as always, and Michael Shannon is out the door, down the street, into your home and having sex with your mother as The Runaways' almost Nietzchian record producer. Dakota Fanning is reel purty but isn't asked to do much besides glower or look forlorn. The musical sequences are quite good and there are a couple of moments when writer/director Floria Sigismondi does an excellent job visually projecting what it's like to be inside the cyclone of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll. The movie also touches on the sexism the group had to endure and combat, but only in the most clichéd and hackneyed of ways. As rock bio-pics go, there sure have been a lot worse than this.What keeps it from being any better is that Cherie Currie's story dominates the movie and it simply isn't that interesting. She's a 15 year old with looks and attitude who got plucked from obscurity to be the band's lead singer, couldn't handle the hard life of being a rock star and crashed back to reality. Joan Jett's tale of ambition and determination takes a decided back seat and the other members of The Runaways can be entirely described as "the jealous one", "the lesbian one" and "the one who barely has any lines and might as well be a mic stand". The best parts are when Shannon's Kim Fowley is completely blunt and ruthless in the molding of these girls young enough to be his daughters into icons of rock, but that largely disappears for the 2nd half of the film. The most intriguing part is how Cherie's older sister Marie (Riley Keough) transforms herself into a mirror image of her little sis. That image suggests so much but none of it is ever explored.If every member of the band had been given a fair share of the narrative and it had focused more on the struggles between The Runaways and Fowley and between them and the rest of the world, I can't help but think that would have been a much more compelling story. Especially because the look of the movie is outstanding in how it captures the zeitgeist of the 1970s. I'm not sure any character's appearance has better symbolized that era of cultural decadence and stylistic chaos than Fowley's.If you're a fan of this group, this genre or this time period, you'll probably enjoy The Runaways. Nobody else needs to rush out and watch it, but there's no reason anyone shouldn't give it a look.