The Runaways

There is a specific, sticky humidity to the mid-1970s San Fernando Valley that most period pieces get wrong, but The Runaways smells like cheap hairspray, asphalt, and teenage desperation from the very first frame. It arrived in 2010, right when the world was reaching peak Twilight saturation, and I think that’s exactly why it vanished into the bargain bins. People expected a sanitized teen flick about girls in a band, but instead, they got a gritty, jagged piece of indie-inflected rock-and-roll biography that cared more about mood than hit singles.

The Twilight of the Child Star

The film’s biggest hurdle was its own marketing. Released during that strange transition era where DVD sales were tanking and streaming was a toddler, the studio didn't quite know what to do with a film starring Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning that featured heavy drug use and a deeply cynical worldview. Kristen Stewart was, at the time, the biggest star on the planet, but she wasn't playing a lovestruck teenager here. As Joan Jett, she is all hunched shoulders and protective glares. It’s a performance of stillness and simmering anger; she captures that Jett "androgyny-as-armor" vibe perfectly.

Then you have Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie, the girl who just wanted to be David Bowie but ended up as a pin-up for middle-aged creeps. Watching Fanning—who we’d all grown up seeing as the precocious child in War of the Worlds—parade around in a corset singing "Cherry Bomb" felt like a deliberate, jarring "I'm an adult now" statement. I watched this movie while wearing a pair of itchy wool socks that I eventually threw across the room in a fit of rock-and-roll solidarity, and honestly, that restless energy is exactly what the film feeds on.

The Svengali in the Room

While the girls are the heart, the film is hijacked by Michael Shannon playing Kim Fowley. If you know Shannon from Man of Steel or Knives Out, you know he specializes in a very specific brand of controlled intensity, but here he is absolutely unhinged. Shannon plays Fowley like a trash-culture vampire, a man who sees these girls not as artists, but as products he can manufacture in a lab.

His "training" sequences—throwing eggs at the girls while they play to simulate a hostile crowd—are some of the most uncomfortable and electric moments in the film. He represents the ugly, exploitative underbelly of the 1970s music machine. He’s the villain, but he’s also the only reason the band exists. That moral grey area is handled with surprising nuance by director Floria Sigismondi, who cut her teeth directing music videos for the likes of Marilyn Manson and David Bowie. You can feel that music-video pedigree in the cinematography by Benoît Debie (who also shot the neon-soaked Spring Breakers). The film looks like a series of Polaroids left out in the sun—overexposed, grainy, and beautiful.

A Forgotten Encore

So why did it bomb? With a $10 million budget, it barely cleared $3 million at the box office. Looking back, it’s clear that it’s a movie that was far too cool for the audience it was marketed to. The Twilight fans wanted romance; the rock fans didn't think Bella Swan could play Joan Jett. They were both wrong.

The film also suffers from the typical biopic "fast-forward" syndrome. It breezes past the other band members—Scout Taylor-Compton as Lita Ford and Stella Maeve as Sandy West are great but have almost nothing to do—and it completely invents a composite character, Robin (played by Alia Shawkat), to replace the band's actual bassist, Jackie Fox, who refused to be involved. This makes the band feel like a duo with backup players rather than a legendary quintet.

Despite those structural flaws, the film captures the "Modern Cinema" transition perfectly. It was shot on film (16mm and 35mm), giving it a texture that digital photography in 2010 was still struggling to replicate. It feels like one of the last gasps of the mid-budget, star-driven indie drama before everything became a franchise or a micro-budget horror flick. It’s a snapshot of a moment in history when being a "bad girl" was a revolutionary act, and it’s aged much better than the franchise that nearly smothered its release.

The Runaways isn't a comprehensive history of the band, but as a mood piece about the price of fame and the loss of innocence, it hits all the right notes. It’s gritty, loud, and anchored by three powerhouse performances that deserved a much larger audience than they found in 2010. If you missed it during the K-Stew mania, it’s time to give this one a spin on the turntable. It’s a flawed record, sure, but the B-sides are where the real soul lives.