Female trouble

There’s a moment early in The Runaways, the new biopic of the pioneering teen-girl rock band of the same name, in which a young Joan Jett—then Joan Larkin—is told by her music teacher, “Girls don’t play electric guitar.” We can see this line coming a mile away. After all, isn’t that what the Runaways, the estrogen-fueled band fronted by Jett, lead singer Cherie Currie and guitarist Lita Ford were all about, proving that chicks can rock?

Well, yes and no. The new film version at least is also about same-sex experimentation, female friendships and the commodification of women’s bodies as a tool for selling records. It’s for these reasons that the lesbian blogosphere has been going wild in anticipation of the film’s Friday 19 release. (It doesn’t hurt that stars Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning canoodle and kiss, either.) First-time screenwriter and director Floria Sigismondi—who was tapped several years ago to direct the film in part because producers wanted the story told from a woman’s perspective—says her mission was to get at the mostly supportive but occasionally testy friendship between Currie and Jett.

“I always stayed focused on the relationships of the girls,” says Sigismondi, a visual artist and music video director by trade. “They always had challenges from the outside world.”

The Runaways follows Jett, a rebellious rocker who meets slick impresario Kim Fowley at a club. He helps her form an all-girl punk band fronted by singer Currie. Their meteoric rise is charted through the struggles of Currie’s family life. Dad is a drunken fool while sister Marie partly supports the family with a fast-food job after mom (played with campy gusto by Tatum O’Neal) departs for Indonesia with a new beau. It’s Currie’s search for family that forms the core of the film. “The story is about Cherie’s family and choosing this band,” says Sigismondi. “Joan Jett becomes her sister in a way—because she’s taking her sister’s place.”

Jett’s own narrative remains elusive. Although, or perhaps because of the fact that Jett serves as the executive producer, Stewart’s version of her comes across as tough, self-assured and even iconic, but the final cut of the film deleted a couple of scenes between Jett and her mother (stand-up comic Tig Notaro). “That’s the only stuff that ended up on the editing floor, two tiny scenes which didn’t really tell you too much,” Sigismondi says. That may be so, but Jett devotees will leave the theater wanting more, including her too-briefly touched upon attraction to women.

Sigismondi says she was unaware the film had generated talk among lesbians but isn’t surprised. “There’s this sexual experimentation that maybe some people would experience at that age,” she says. “Just playing with that idea, and trying to find yourself through that, especially in the ’70s.”

While much has been made of the casting of Stewart, the ingenue who plays Bella in the wildly popular teen vamp series Twilight, Sigismondi shrugs off the buzz. “We had locked her in before the first Twilight came out,” she says. “I just wanted to work with her from Into the Wild. I had no idea what [Twilight] was about. [The Runaways] is really about transforming these girls, and she was 100 percent willing to go there. She was able to live it and embody the character without having to bring Bella.”

Of course, it helped that Jett and Currie were on set dispensing advice to the cast and crew. “They offered me really nice things, like that they were very close and would peel each other’s oranges,” says Sigismondi. “It’s about the nuances in the way they take care of each other. That all came across in a really nice way.”

The Runaways opens Friday 19.

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