#23111-420 the runaways

hey dolls

The great, cheering irony of the Runaways is that they epitomized rock ’n’ roll without making very good records. Five teenage girls from broken and semi-broken California homes, they stuck a flag in the twitching corpse of mid-’70s hard rock and said: Women can do this, too. That they were pure, manipulated product does not detract from their historical importance or their musical effrontery. In rock, it’s about the attitude as much as the music. In some cases, more so.

And the Runaways were all attitude: Joan Jett cranking out troglodyte riffs on her rhythm guitar while Lita Ford outdid the boys for pop-metal wankery on lead; drummer Sandy West keeping a primitive tom-tom pulse while Jackie Fox held down bass; singer Cherie Currie out front like a cheerleader gone psycho, acting out beautiful, dumb “hits’’ like “Cherry Bomb.’’ From the Runaways flow the distaff rock bands that followed: Bangles and Go-Go’s and Breeders and Sleater-Kinney and Donnas, all the way to the tomboys playing in the garage down at the end of your block.

The first half of “The Runaways’’ keeps that promise in most of its pimply, headlong glory. Adapted from Currie’s memoir, “Neon Angel,’’ by the photographer/music-video director Floria Sigismondi, the film refuses to romanticize even when it’s bending the truth. (Fox chose not to participate, so a fictional bassist named Robin, played by Alia Shawkat, has been invented.) Jett, Currie, and the others are teen outcasts in Me Generation Los Angeles, aching to break out of their lives. You can feel their frustration, their need to make an unholy racket.

The movie pops to life when Jett (Kristen Stewart) introduces herself to music business Svengali Kim Fowley outside a club one night. Played in a deranged star-making performance by Michael Shannon, Fowley is a mercurial glam brute who immediately sees the potential for outrage in an underage girl band. He bullies the Runaways into being.

In this telling, West (Stella Maeve) is the placid emotional anchor and Ford(Scout Taylor-Compton) is mostly an afterthought, despite her notable heavy-metal solo career. The drama kicks in when Fowley recruits nightclubbing lost girl Currie (Dakota Fanning) as the group’s frontwoman. “I like your style,’’ he says. “Want to be in a band?’’

The best scenes in “The Runaways’’ involve long, antagonistic practice sessions in a cramped trailer, Fowley berating the girls with creative invective while joining Jett to compose “Cherry Bomb’’ after Currie shows up to audition with a Peggy Lee song. Later he instructs them on the finer points of dodging flying beer bottles; Jett discovers to her delight that she can volley them back into the audience with her guitar. The concert sequences sound great, in no large part because Jett (who coproduced) has newly re-recorded the songs for maximum sonic boom.

Currie’s fractured home life is also sketched in with paint-peeling details: a self-dramatizing actress mom (Tatum O’Neal, unrecognizable and excellent), a drunk dad (Brett Cullen), a twin sister (Riley Keough, daughter of Lisa Marie Presley and thus a certified Elvis DNA carrier) who’s quietly crushed that fame doesn’t come in twos. After a while, the Runaways make it big — sort of — and the movie shifts into a much more conventional story of too-much-too-soon, with Fowley trying to turn Currie into the star, and the singer retreating into drug abuse and bad behavior. A sad story and an old one, and “The Runaways’’ does little to make it compelling all over again.

Maybe that’s why Fanning seems tentative for the first time in her illustrious little career. Eerily inventive when she plays fictional characters, the actress may be hampered by the film’s generic rise-and-fall rock journey. Then, too, this Cherie Currie is a waif seeking a persona, and Fanning can’t seem to give the drift any bite or meaning.

Ironically, while Fanning’s almost certainly the better actress, Stewart gives the better performance in “The Runaways.’’ I wouldn’t have thought it possible; Stewart has never shown the edge or aggression of a rocker like Jett, and her sullenness seems insubstantial — reactive rather than pro-active. Yet she hunches in on her guitar like a boxer entering a protective crouch, and her voice has a husky, cut-the-crap directness. She owns the movie with a swagger all the more believable for not being overplayed.

With a few exceptions, that’s the real Jett’s singing voice we hear, but Stewart’s imposture convinces. And when “The Runaways’’ gets to the scene where Jett finally moves in on Currie with a lascivious sneer — a kink in the boredom of the road — it’s like a “Twilight’’ of the rock ’n’ roll demi-gods. For all the lip-service “The Runaways’’ pays to the lead singer, its heart is with Team Joan.