A genre film is a genre film is a genre film. The Runaways, directed by newcomer Floria Sigismondi, is no exception. The film is the most recent entry in the musician-biopic genre, a cycle that has included such remarkable films as Ray, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, 2gether, Crazy Heart, Walk the Line, Spice World, and this marvelous trailer for Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. The films are generally very formulaic, and thus elicit very little commentary.

That said, what we can do with a genre film is find its moments of transgression and appreciate them for their extra-formulaic qualities. So, what makes The Runaways different than Spice World?

Yes, I wish I had that chair. And that jacket.

The most striking thing about the film is the performance by Michael Shannon. It ain’t no surprise that we love Shannon here: My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done was one of our favorite films of last year, and his take as a matricidal psycho really makes that film special. That said, and even if I had never heard of that madman until my exposure to this film, I would still loudly proclaim Shannon’s Kim Fowley to be the shining achievement of the film.

He plays the producer/manager of the eponymous band of misfit girls. His slurred statements of encouragement/discouragement are raw, stupidly insane, clever, and twisted. He organizes the girls’ practice in a trailer in the middle of an empty Los Angeles lot, where he screams at the 15-17 year old girls to think with their cocks and be dirty.

His performance here, always dressed like a drugged up dandy, takes over the story as it takes over every scene. In the film he writes the songs, he creates the personae, he does everything BUT play on tour. I don’t know (or care) what the actual historical precedent is here, but Shannon’s strong presence forces us to view The Runaways as an extension of Kim Fowley’s sexual desire for grungy jailbait.

At this point in the film, Fowley tells Cherie she must sing about grabbing dicks or leave the band.

This is a truly transgressive thing about the film. Based on the trailer and the promotional materials regarding this film, the assumed plot is: females achieving success in a man’s world through girl power and sisterhood, breaking the rock and roll glass ceiling in the process. What Michael Shannon’s uncontrollable character achieves in this film is to halt this narrative and make a girl-band film into an erotic ego-trip for a maniac.

Probably the only other extra-generic moment in the film is the spaced out, surreal sexual encounter between Joan Jett and the Cherry Bomb Cherie Currie. Their sexuality in the film is ambiguous and open, a product of late 1960s free-love trickling down to high school kids in the 1970s (as I think is best exemplified by the Austin film Dazed and Confused). So naturally, there will be a love scene with the two leaders of the band/film. Whether they hooked up in real life is irrelevant, of course, to the diegetic necessities of Hollywood storytelling.

Joan Jett and Cherie Currie trying to out-cool each other.

What is worth mentioning, however, is that Jett is played by the twenty year-old Kristen Stewart* (her twentieth birthday is today, actually, so she was nineteen during principal photography. Happy birthday!), while Cherie is embodied by the sixteen year-old Dakota Fanning, who was actually fifteen at the time of shooting. The scene itself is tame, but nevertheless exploits our desire to see these two starlets in erotic contact. Their coitus has absolutely no function within the narrative. It serves ONLY to satisfy male desire.

Now, this is nothing spectacular in itself, except that usually Hollywood draws a line at exploitative sex scenes, and I’d say that fifteen years-old is past that line. It left me feeling a little creepy, knowing how sexualized we were making this little girl.

Here it comes...

That said, I do want to state my interest in Ms. Fanning. She is a strange-looking teenager with a body that is inappropriate for her age. I am very excited to see what happens to her. She is a fine actress for a kid. Will she be able to be a sex symbol in her twenties? Will she become the next Meryl Streep? Or maybe the next Lindsey Lohan? Only time will tell.

That’s about everything there is to say about The Runaways. Alia Shawkat, who plays Maeby Fünke in “Arrested Development,” appeared here as the bass player but I don’t think she had any lines. That is a shame for such a great young comedienne.

*I think today is the day I realize that movie stars are not older than me, but are actually younger. All of my life I have been seeing pictures starring people like George Clooney and Jennifer Garner and acknowledging that these were films about people above my age range. Now, seeing that Stewart is only twenty, I see that Hollywood has passed me by.