Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) is a rebellious teen winning her 10th grade talent contest as David Bowie. Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) is a tough bisexual teen sniffing glue and playing her guitar. She faces a lot of sexist attitudes. She approaches record producer Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon) outside a club to start an all-girl band. Kim introduces Joan to drummer Sandy West (Stella Maeve). Then Kim and Joan recruit Cherie into the band. Kim toughens the girls into an edgy rock band.

Dakota Fanning is trying to do more rougher roles. Kristen Stewart has a good handle on the tough young chick character. The girls do a good job. Then there is Michael Shannon. He is amazing in this. This is not necessarily a ground breaking music bio. In fact, it follows the try-and-true formula of all such movies. It just does it very well. Also it has some pretty good music.

Michael Shannon is really great in this. He's really out there and almost steals the movie from our two leads (played by Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning). I had no idea who they were playing or what the movie was about (having seen it at a Sneak Preview and generally avoiding reading too much beforehand).

It's about growing up, about the music business, with very good performances. Though you might find it difficult to watch Dakota in a role like this, if you are used to see her as a kid. Well she's on the verge of becoming an adult and that plays into the role too of course. Kristen playing a sort of anchor in the movie. It is not a perfect movie, but it has many things going for it (the actors for one)!

This film is something of a biopic, following the band the Runaways from its inception to its disbanding. In particular, the focus is on Cherrie Currie and Joan Jett, leaving the other members -- notably Lita Ford -- as mere background footage.

I liked "Runaways", but it's really not all that great. If you don't already have a solid understanding of who Joan Jett, Cherrie Currie and Lita Ford are, it didn't really explain things. It was also lopsided in that it focused on Joan despite being based on the book about Cherrie, and Kristen Stewart made very little attempt to go outside her "safe" range of acting. In other words, it was like watching Stewart, not Jett.

Dakota Fanning is capable of amazingly innocent or not-so-innocent roles, but despite this film being based on Currie's biography, her character comes off as the minor one to Joan Jett. Granted, as Jett today is the bigger star, this makes sense... but then the focus was disjointed. Fanning was able to be a dirty glam-loving rebel, so it is too bad her part was played down.

Beyond that, as I said, the focus was disjointed and you had to know the story going into it. Nothing was expressed too explicitly, so when the band rises and falls, and meets up with various problems, it seems that none of them are fully explored. One solution would be to add twenty or thirty minutes on to the movie, but this would do little to save it if that filler was just more of Kristen Stewart.