I really wanted to like The Runaways because I like that band – I think they were cool and I think their music was cool. Their music was part of the last dying breath of real Rock & Roll, before it was neutered by sanitized metal and hair bands in the mid-to-late 1980s, and Nirvana subsequently dealt it the death blow in the early 1990s, finishing it forever. Think back to that time: The Runaways, The Ramones, The Clash, Thin Lizzy, Cheap Trick, AC/DC, BOC, J Geils, The Tubes, Toto, early Blondie, early Heart, early Van Halen, whomever – it was wild, it was fun, it was interesting, it was spontaneous sounding. No one was in tune, no one played in good time, but none of it mattered because each band was a beautiful and musical organic whole, much greater than the sum of it parts. If you ever want to hear how painfully awful modern popular music is, take a trip down memory lane with some of these bands, and marvel at (to give one example) how much better the natural human voice sounded than the creepy, autotuned “robo-voices” of our sad, benighted era.

The problem with The Runaways is that they did not capture the energy and attitude of the music properly, simple as that. The closest they came was the “Cherry Bomb” scene, which was okay (despite some painful overacting by the guy playing Kim Fowley) but was far from great. Other than that, the music scenes fall really flat, and often come across as an afterthought. They made an attempt to capture the energy and attitude of the band members (mostly unsuccessfully I think) but that is quite different to capturing the music itself, and the later artistic challenge was the much more important one.

Listen to what The Runaways actually sounded like (live, in 1977), and decide for yourself how close the filmmakers got:

Compare The Runaways to Walk The Line, in particular the way Walk The Line captured the spirit and energy of Johny Cash’s music, both its creation and its performance. The concert scenes were electrifying in Walk The Line, especially the duets with June Carter, because they paid a lot of attention to how the music was recorded, presented, and came across in the context of a movie, and they made sure the voices they cast did justice to the originals (in my opinion, they actually exceeded them.)

The Runaways needed this kind of approach, but they completely dropped the ball. They totally failed to capture Cherie Currie’s husky voice and the characterful way she used it in their music. Dakota Fanning made an attempt to mimic her, but it was a lame, doomed attempt. Let’s face it: they needed to cast that character for her voice. And Kristen Stewart sounds nothing like Joan Jet – when she is singing, Kristen Stewart sounds like … a slightly more animated version of Kristen Stewart. Fanning’s songs were lifeless and disappointing; Stewart’s just sounded wrong.

They also totally missed the confidence of Lita Ford’s playing – they needed a much better guitarist to play the Lita Ford parts. And I was surprised how Lita Ford got the shaft all throughout the narrative – they make her out to be a cardboard bitch and they don’t even tell you what happened to her (or Sandy West) after the band broke up. Not only is that crappy, it’s just plain bad storytelling.

But it’s not just the music they blew, they pretty much blew the whole rest of it too. The film wastes a great deal of time on uninteresting stuff like Currie’s family life ( which leads nowhere and in the end does not even provide a compelling explanation for while she leaves the band), lame-ass faux-arty lesbian sequences between Fanning and Stewart (why did they even bother – who could this possibly be aimed at?), and the drug and alcohol exploits of the girls. It spends almost no time on all the critical stuff: the song writing, the instrument playing, the relationship of the various band members with each other (they hardly say anything of substance to each other), how they became popular, the Japanese tour (how big was it, and why?), and why the band eventually broke up. Maybe I’m overstating the scale of the disaster, but this movie really took the very easy way out: shove the “rebel” Stewart and cute little Dakota Fanning on the screen, all dolled up, and have them act like sluts.

I wouldn’t say this film is not worth seeing, especially if you like rock music movies. But it is fairly disappointing when you compare it to what it should have been.