I love girl bands. I like a lot of music, but girl bands... especially girl bands like THE RUNAWAYS... I saw THE RUNAWAYS at the Armadillo World Headquarters in that glorious world of the seventies when I was just a kid. My parents took me, it wasn't some cute as Barbie group - they were ferocious... and most importantly they fucking rocked. Literally... so long as I live, I'll never ever forget seeing them play CHERRY BOMB - there was something about that song, those girls and the way the screamed CHERRY BOMB that forever tattooed into my soul a love for girls unlike previous generations of girls. Girls that were sexually aggressive, that owned their bodies and enjoyed them. They got tattoos, they played rock n roll and they were amazing. They just didn't last very long. But their influence... well, it goes well beyond the world of music - look at a site like SUICIDE GIRLS, I'm there usually twice a day, girls rock and as girls left their poodle skirts and sweaters behind for saftey pins and spray painted shirts... I couldn't wait to see this movie.

After an incredibly frantic race to the screening this morning... I won't get into it, but it did involve 90mph... Yoko and I arrived in the theater just moments before the opening title hit the screen. No time to settle, I was just thrust into the opening and that's how this film should be seen. In a rush. A rush to see the THE RUNAWAYS.

The film follows the evolution and too quick demise of THE RUNAWAYS, that amazing all girl concept band that didn't monkey around. You see a young Joan Larkin buy her first leather coat and suddenly - she became Joan Jett. Joan had a dream of an all girl band that would rock as hard, if not harder, than the boys. She wanted to play electric guitar, but the film shows how difficult it was for a girl to even get instructions for playing it. In the film, Kristen's Joan goes to a music instructor who tells her girls don't play electric. Obviously stuck on Joan Baez apparently, and that's not a bad thing, that's just not the type of Joan that Joan Jett was cut out to be.

One night at a club, she spied Music Producer Kim Fowley - announced to him that she played guitar and aspired to put together an all-girl rock band. Now if you want a history of THE RUNAWAYS - it is pretty much available to read everywhere - but in Floria Sigismondi's film called THE RUNAWAYS - it is brought to life in a blisteringly fun way.

First off... Michael Shannon is the shit. He first arrived with GROUNDHOG DAY, in what now seems to have been a million years ago. We saw him in a number of roles, but frankly he didn't stand front and center in a film I saw until William Friedkin's brilliant BUG. From that point on, his name was in my mind. In 2006, Michael Shannon gave the very best performance by an actor that year. He didn't have an army of publicists working for him, so he didn't even garner a nomination. Kinda like Tom Hardy/BRONSON this year. But that disparity will only disappear when the Academy shakes up how things are done. In THE RUNAWAYS, Michael plays legendary Rock Producer Kim Fowley - and man... I love him. He teaches these girls to "sing with their cock" and conditioned them for the punk rock music scene and just watching him train, mold and give them the secrets of Rock N Roll.... well, it's a delight - and all kinds of inappropriate. Fuck Jack Black, this is the real School of Rock.... I mean, where's their RUNAWAYS? Heh.

Then there's the two stars of the film... Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie. They are absolutely fantastic.

Kristen Stewart is amazing to watch - there's a shyness that reads as alienation perfectly in this film. Kristen is beautiful, but in a soft way, she doesn't project a ferocious lover, instead she comes across as that girl that might suddenly start making out with you in a club... but who could take or leave you. She's breaking the rules and discovering who she is along the way in the film. She plays Joan as a girl coming into her own. At the start of the film - she's a bit lost. Doesn't know how to play the guitar, but she has songs in her head. She can hear them, she just isn't quite capable of getting them out there. When Michael Shannon's Kim Fowley begins building a band around her - the pieces fall in place - and the only person that can hear the sound in her head better than her is probably Kim. He hears pieces of it in her, but he realizes that they need something more.

That something more was Cherie Currie, as played by Dakota Fanning. Now... people got a raging angry boner at the very concept of HOUNDDOG... A film that was all about a girl that wanted to sing like Elvis and wound up in a terrible rape, but the film suddenly became "The Dakota Fanning Rape Movie" to the world. In THE RUNAWAYS, Dakota is playing Cherie Currie, who was 15 when she joined the band (same age as Dakota). Cherie didn't handle success very well... diving head first into the realm of drugs, sex and rock & roll. In the film, we don't see Dakota naked - so you pervs can forget screen grabs. Instead, the sex and promiscuity is shot in a very non-exploitive, but erotic manner. Her love scene with Kristen Stewart will probably rot a lot of brains - and Dakota is used perfectly to show something more than what Cherie Currie's public image was. Let's face it, Cherie was the highly sexualized fetishized Jail Bait rocker of the group. In the film, Floria shows how hot and stunning Dakota is - but at the very same time, you see why even though the image may be there, the psyche isn't. Dakota's Cherie is constantly visibly trying to catch up and exceed the others. With drugs, sex and the rest. But it is tearing her up. At home she has a father in a constant state of alcoholic coma, and her mom, played by Tatum O'Neal, is off in Indonesia with a new hubby.

Kristen and Dakota are amazing to watch together in this film. Even if their public personas are a bit reversed in reality. Questions constantly hitting tabloids as to what state Kristen is in, while Dakota finds herself as a consummate professional. In the film, you see Joan exploit Cherie, care for her and ultimately feel sad for her.

Of the other girls in the band, my fave is the RUNAWAYS' drummer, Sandy West as played by Stella Maeve, if anything, she's just the right kind of laid back rock on type of Drummer chick that's fun to party with. The other members of the band just aren't really given the focus, which is rightly upon Joan, Cherie and Kim Fowley.

Getting the back story on THE RUNAWAYS shows us just how apt that name was. The girls all seemed to be running away from home by shacking up with Rock N Roll - and thank God they had fucked up home lives, if they didn't - they wouldn't have been who they were. By the film's end... as we see a more MTV clothed Joan Jett being interviewed about her debut album with JOAN JETT & THE BLACKHEARTS... it has that right, awesome feel.

THE RUNAWAYS is a fantastic film. It premieres at SXSW and shortly thereafter in theaters nationwide. Like the original RUNAWAYS, these girls and this movie rock. I'm actually really looking forward to seeing it again, from the very beginning.

And before I go - I'm gonna call out Yesim 'Shimmy' Osman, who is credited as the Key Hair Stylist on THE RUNAWAYS. The hair in this film is just so blissfully seventies, in particular - Dakota's Cherie hair... it really really should come back. Please. Girls. Like this. Please. For us. Please.