"The Runaways" is a cinematic miracle

Kristen Stewart & Dakota Fanning at The Runaways New York After Party 3-17-2010.
Dakota Fanning & Kristen Stewart at 2010 SXSW Festival - "The Runaways" 3-18-2010.
New stills of Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett in "The Runaways".

"Sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Angst and anger and alienation. Rags to riches to heartbreak. We’ve seen this all before... and we haven’t, either. Not like this. There hasn’t been a movie like The Runaways, one about women rockers that’s just as raw and earthy and tough and pitiless as the ones about the men are. “This isn’t about women’s lib, it’s about women’s libido,” Fowley screams in one of the many wonderfully frenzied moments Michael Shannon (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Lucky You) imbues him with: he’s excited about the possibility of these chicks, and while he is ever obnoxious in how he pushes them -- like when he makes the band practice dealing with heckers by hiring guys to come throw crushed beer cans and feces at them during a rehearsal -- he’s never wrong. If he’s attempting to exploit them, Jett and Currie never acede and let themselves be exploited (or at least not any further than is beneficial to them). Perhaps the most truly amazing thing about The Runaways is how Sigismondi keeps all sense of the exploitive out of the film.Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie.

Teenaged girls getting shit thrown at them by teenaged boys could have been deeply creepy... and so could have, say, the underaged Fanning parading around in fuck-me lingerie, or Fowley’s glee at the prospect of Currie’s appeal to music fans: “Jail-fucking-bait!” he cries. “Jack-fucking-pot!” That The Runaways manages to be about sex without being self-consciously titillating and about rage without being overputtingly bitter itself is a cinematic miracle". Source: www.flickfilosopher.com