Sundance 2010 first look: Exit Through the Gift Shop, The Runaways

In the mid-’90s, French expat and thrift-store owner Thierry Guetta started following around his cousin—a graffiti practitioner nicknamed “Space Invader”—with a video camera. Guetta soon started shooting other key artists in the emerging street art scene: Neckface, Buff Monster, Shepard “Obey” Fairey. The guy he really wanted to meet, however, was Banksy, a mysterious Brit best known for tagging London with satirically stenciled rats (see above) and spray-painting murals on the Israel’s West Bank wall.

After finally working his way into the reclusive legend’s circle and documenting Banksy’s seminal “Barely Legal” show in Los Angeles, the OCD (obsessive compulsive documentarian) Guetta showed a work-in-progress movie about the underground movement. The subject proposed that he take a crack at editing the thousands of hours of footage, and that the filmmaker himself should start dabbling in public defacement. That modest proposal would eventually give birth to Pop Art’s version of Frankenstein’s monster.

Both an exhaustive history of the graphic-arts guerrillas who reinvented an outlaw medium and a portrait of accidental greatness, Exit Through the Gift Shop says more about celebrity, pomo appropriation, social critique through creative vandalism and the $64K question—who gets to call it art?—than a dozen like-minded docs combined. It was also a gift to those of us who’d suffered through a lot of mediocrities and to the film festival that, appropriately, programmed the Spotlight entry on the sly.

Familiar-looking spray-painted figures had been popping up throughout Park City in the past week, but no one knows what Banksy looks like: His interview testimonials are shot in silhouette and voice-altered, while the priceless sequences of the gent plying his trade pixel-out his puss. You could hear festgoers talking among themselves during the event’s first weekend—”Is he here? Anyone think he’s gonna show on Sunday night to introduce the movie? Yo, dude, are you, like, Banksy?!?” But we simply got John Cooper reading a note from the director, apologizing for not being there (or was he?) and the sense that we were somehow part of an elaborate hoax. “It’s all true,” read the note. “Except for the bits where we lie.” Rube or not, I had found my bliss; the mystery man delivered the single most exhilarating and inventive nonfiction feature to screen here so far.

In terms of capturing an alt-cultural moment, Exit nails the subversive thrill of what Fairey et al. accomplished with tweaked iconography, a blank wall and an endless sense of Pop pranksterism. You won’t get a similar second-hand high with The Runaways, Floria Sigusmondi’s surprisingly stock biopic on the ’70s fem-powered rock group. Adapted largely from singer Cherie Currie’s autobiography, the movie treads a well-worn path: Young wanna-be stars Currie (Dakota Fanning) and Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart, whose feral-tigress turn is the film’s one saving grace) start a band, become successful—and an item. Then drugs, decadence and a sleazy Svengali (Michael Shannon as Kim Fowley) turn everything into ashes and scratched vinyl. There’s even a eureka moment in a trailer as Fowley and Jett pull the lyrics to “Cherry Bomb” out of thin air. Sigh. Enjoy the feathered hair and face makeup that Sigusmondi puts on display, and try not to tune out when the former music-video director starts laying on the overlit slo-mo thicker than clumping mascara. Her movie is as trashy, tawdry and tarted-up as a glam-rock single, but regarding the band’s real-life rise and fall, it ain’t a stone cold fox. Just cold.