THE RUNAWAYS (2010) (***)

Young teens dream of rock 'n roll stardom. They make it. Drugs and egos fuel their spiral down. Sounds like every music biopic and you're not going to get much more here. But what you will get is three fine performances that lift up the material to a more compelling level.

As the film proposes, Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart, TWILIGHT) wanted to form an all-girl rock band to prove that the girls can rock as hard as the boys. At a club, she meets Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD), a notorious record producer who trolls the clubs looking for the next it act. He introduces Jett to Sandy West (Stella Maeve, BROOKLYN'S FINEST), a drummer who has the same all-girl rock 'n roll dream. To Fowley's great surprise, they can rock. So he gets the idea to put the ultimate jailbait in the lead. He finds Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning, WAR OF THE WORLDS), a Bowie-obsessed 15-year-old and transforms her from a pussycat into a tigress.

Stewart, Fanning and Shannon are the driving force behind this ride. If Jett is the engine and Currie is the shiny paint than Fowley is the fuel. He never treats the girls like little girls. He hurls obscenities at them like it's a men's locker room and never worries for a second about sending these underaged young women to foreign lands virtually on their own. On a plane trip to Japan their chaperone advises them that if they are carrying any drugs they better use them or lose them, so they venture into the bathroom to get sky high. Shannon makes him a twisted Svengali who has a burning desire for the rock 'n roll lifestyle and the money it can make him.

Stewart gives Jett a tough, but awkward personality. She's the real deal, wanting to learn how to play and using the music as a way to convey the feelings that she has a hard time vocalizing in real life. The only problem with the character has nothing to do with her performance. The film deifies her a bit, making her seem like the only true artist in the group. Jett was a producer. Fanning makes Currie the polar opposite of Jett. She doesn't play any instruments and isn't really a singer until Fowley makes her one. Her talent at her high school talent show is to perfectly dress up like Ziggy Stardust, and lip synch to Bowie tunes.

What the film lacks in depth of characterization is made up for in the depth of the performances. Shannon shines. Watching Stewart and Fanning is like watching kids grow up right on the screen. These are more mature roles than we've seen them in before and they bring a maturity to their immature characters. They all had dreams of stardom and got a taste before they ever knew what they really wanted.