Girls' turn to suffer in rock biopic

The VH1 series "Behind the Music" revealed the tragic flaw shared by most rock bands - they were full of men.

And so the rise-and-fall narratives were amazingly consistent: a garage, a gig, a manager, a record deal, tours, drugs, girls, detox, bankruptcy.

At no time do any of the band members suspect the record company might want them drunk and distracted when the money is counted. A foolproof scheme, so long as bands continued to be staffed by men, the most gullible and predictable gender.

And so it is with some degree of surprise that a movie like "The Runaways" shows this technique works almost equally well on women.

"The Runaways" is the bio-pickin' story of the protean L.A. band of late-'70s girl rockers, led musically by Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) and fronted by sex kittenish Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning).

It's a standard story of a wild band's shooting star trajectory, with above-average period details and a weird wrinkle - from the outset, the group is molded and guided by eccentric Svengali Kim Fowley, played by Hollywood's leading weirdo in residence, Michael Shannon ("Bug," and Oscar-nominated for "Revolutionary Road").

Fowley fancied himself a kind of L.A. Andy Warhol, an impresario/aficionado who wanted to deconstruct rock and rebuild it as performance art - feminized, with girls, real rockers, who could subvert and rechannel rock's currents of anger and rebellion, and make new use of its phallic symbols.

This might be of interest to rock theoreticians, but it doesn't make for much of a movie - Fowley's obscene and pretentious outbursts about the meaning and purpose of The Runaways sound way too much like screenwriting.

And the movie has a confusing polarity of relationships - Fowley to Currie, Currie to Jett, Jett to Fowley. It feels like it's about all of them and none of them (there's still more about Currie's family problems), and the lack of focus worsens when the girls go on tour and Fowley is stuck on the end of a phone, always deadening in a movie.

"The Runaways" works best when the music is allowed to speak for itself. Stewart and Fanning do their own playing/singing, bringing life to the sound.

At its best it has an atonal, thrashy, post-punk feel similar to what the L.A. band "X" was doing around that time, and you can see how The Runaways probably made the rock world safe for Courtney Love (even if Love was not safe for rock).

The band's self-destruction is less original, as are the dynamics surrounding its breakup, the usual complaining about the lead singer getting inordinate attention. Compare these scenes to similar scenes in "Almost Famous" and they feel a little flat.

Produced by John Linson, Art Linson, Bill Pohlad; written and directed by Floria Sigismondi, music by Lillian Berlin, distributed by Apparition.