At the photo shoot for our 2010 Hollywood cover, Kristen Stewart took a break from looking at once sultry and anguished to tell Krista Smith about playing rocker Joan Jett in The Runaways. And loath as the actress was to reveal what book she was reading (not Twilight) and what band she was digging these days (not the Runaways), she kindly obliged.
"Joan enthusiastically recalls, "I asked her if she was going to cut her hair and she said "Yeah!" Adds Kristen: "I would've felt like a fraud if I wore a wig. Dakota's wig looked amazing, though." There was one poignant scene where Dakota, as 15-year-old Cherie, cuts her hair to resemble David Bowie's sexy shag.
While Joan's fashion in the film consists mostly of leather and homemade T-Shirts, Cherie finds herself performing in the over-the-top looks. (Cherie was a clean-cut blonde Valley girl who was hand-picked to front the band for her look; but she quickly fell into the hard-partying rockstar lifestyle, using her glittery platform boots to crush pills so she could snort them.) Dakota says she "got to keep pretty much everything" from the wardrobe, including the platform glitter boots and a lingerie set she wears to perform "CherryBomb" in Japan". Source: www.huffingtonpost.com
"Enter Currie, a David Bowie disciple whom Jett and Fowley spot at a club. With the proper prompting, which consists mostly of being browbeaten and humiliated by Fowley, Currie learns to front a band, to spit out lyrics to songs like "Cherry Bomb" that make her seem way beyond the teenager she really is.
Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning at NY premiere of "The Runaways", on March 17, 2010 in New York City.Jett and Currie form a sort of alliance, but Currie is eventually too lost in her own problems to keep the band going.
Stewart is surprisingly good as Jett; the head-down non-responsive attitude that is so annoying in the "Twilight" films is much more at home here. Jett is lost, after all, until she cranks up her guitar, at which point Stewart comes alive, as well. And Fanning, famous as a child star, is all grown up as Currie - or at least as grown up as Currie was allowed to be". Source: www.azcentral.com
"The most entertaining thing about The Runaways, a highly watchable if mostly run-of-the-mill group biopic, is that its writer-director, Floria Sigismondi, has a sixth sense for how the Runaways were bad-angel icons first and a rock & roll band second.
Early on, we see Kristen Stewart, as the black-shag-haired Joan Jett, in an L.A. boutique, where she has to coerce the saleswoman
into selling her a man's studded biker jacket. Stewart's casually likable, no-frills performance starts with Jett's 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 (pronounced Sher-ee), who cuts her platinum hair into a David Bowie shag so that she can lip-synch to him at a high school talent contest.
These girls have their outlaw fashion bona fides down. But it takes Kim Fowley, the L.A. record producer who becomes their shrewd, hectoring Svengali, to teach them how to rock out like boys. Fowley, who favors red leather jackets and dog collars the size of tiaras, is a hyped-up hustler-manipulator who has seen through the rebel artifice of rock & roll yet loves it anyway. As played by Michael Shannon, the great actor from Revolutionary Road, he looks like a punk Frankenstein and shouts everything as if in mid-tantrum. He's a creep, and proud of it, but he knows what sells. He places Cherie in the band based on her looks alone, as if he were casting a porno film. That she's only 15 is just icing on the bad-girl cake.
There's a fun scene set in a grungy rehearsal trahler, where Fowley, with a little help from Joan, makes up ''Cherry Bomb'' on the spot and teaches Cherie to sing it with nasty glee. You can see the girls co-opting the male hormonal thrust of rock and making it their own.
When it gets away from the stage, though, and from the iconography of strutting she-devil-in-lingerie empowerment, The Runaways is a glumly episodic rock saga. It stays true to how the band's members were exploited, yet there's a special challenge in bringing this story to life, since the Runaways were really just little girls who fed themselves into a buzz-saw machine of record-industry hype". Source: www.ew.comMichael Shannon talks about "The Runaways".
"The Runaways" - 'Rowdy First Gig'
"The Runaways" - 'Roller Rink Rockin' clip.