As The Runaways has finally being released in Ireland this weekend, we thought it a good idea to bump this review from Cherry Bomb.

When you go to see a movie, you enter the cinema with a certain amount of expectation. If it’s a comedy, you want to have a good amount of belly-chuckling and to leave the place randomly cackling at bits you remember being damn funny. If it’s a horror, you’ll want to leap out of your seat while shrieking at an ungodly level and be able to leave the place looking over your shoulder expecting everything and anything. And if it’s a music-based movie, set around the lives of one of the bands that made their mark on rock and roll history (right), you’ll want to be whirling your head around screaming along to your favourite anthem and leave the cinema with the full intention of forming the best band in the world.

Thankfully, The Runaways delivers. From start to finish, the movie brings to life the story of the girls that soon became the stuff of legend.

The movie is loosely based around Cherie Currie’s memoirs Neon Angel, so the film is mainly focused on her life and quite a bit of Jett’s rather than a full delve into the life of each band member. It opens with the delicate Cherie’s (played brilliantly by Dakota Fanning) entrance into womanhood, marking the beginning of life for her and showing us something so simple and innocent in comparison to her insane rock and roll lifestyle a couple of years after this occurrence. When Stewart graces the screen, all thoughts are erased of Bella in Twilight; instead we are left with a raveonette tomboy looking to buy her first leather jacket. All the attitude of Joan Jett is in the young actress, who in every way, completely nailed the performance.

As the movie continues we get to see both Fanning and Stewart (left) move on from looking every inch the wanna-be rock star to being the star. We see young Cherie’s as the girl before the singer, and Joan Jett, as the guitarist before the guitar god. Manager Kim Fowley (a stellar performance by Michael Shannon) and Joan Jett try to create a song for young Currie to sing for her audition for the band and after much gyrating, gesticulating and sneering, come up with the riot girl hit Cherry Bomb, which Cherie at first is reluctant to sing because of its filthy lyrics. This scene displays the tumbling of the final threshold of innocence for Cherie, before she can take on the crotch-thrusting, writhing frontwoman persona as her new self, and Fanning captures it wonderfully.

As the film goes on, we see hints of ego, the escalating drug and alcohol use and the completely unbridled attitude of the girls rocking out in a man’s world, trying to keep up when they were only growing up. Many elements of the film are dark but give us a taste of what the teenage girls went through, from their nadir to their zenith. Unexpectedly, this part of the story is complimented by moments that will leave you laughing (usually involving the insane Fowley) or punching the air (one or two in particular involving Stewart invoking the take-no-shit spirit of rock n roll).

The film is enjoyable regardless of whether or not you were an avid fan of the band before seeing it, and it gives the rest of the world a nice taste of the first real queens of noise, the women who paved the way for so many other female musicians to blaze a trail into the industry and all at the tender ages of 15 and 17.

As far as expectations go, it exceeded mine and then some. It’s a movie that promised rock and roll, and I for one left with an adrenaline rush and an unyielding desire to play every rock and roll CD I own at top volume while violently air-guitaring.

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