Sundance 2010: The Runaways, Welcome To The Rileys

Kristen Stewart had two films in Sundance this year, and anyone wondering if the role of Bella has made her more conservative in her choice of roles outside the Twilight franchise might be a bit shocked at how far she's prepared to go. I'll start with Welcome To The Rileys, in which James Gandolfini plays Doug Riley, a married man whose wife (Melissa Leo) has become a neurotic recluse since the death of their daughter. On a work trip to New Orleans, he stumbles into a strip club where he meets Mallory (Stewart), a grubby, bruised stripper who offers him sex, then freaks out, thinking he's a cop, and asks him to leave. Later, they meet by accident in a coffee bar; Doug takes her back to her sordid home and stays the night. The chance meeting inspires something in Doug, so he calls his wife, tells her he's staying put, and moves in with Mallory to explore a tentative father-daughter friendship.

It sounds kind of sweet, but in actual fact it's really rather dull; the pace is painfully leaden and it's a full 45 minutes before Doug even makes the call to his wife. Gandolfini gives Doug a lot of pathos and vulnerability, but the story, never mind the script, simply isn't there for him – he seems to drift through the movie, and the tone never really develops: is this a really weird, gentle comedy, or a really, really flat drama? It was hard to tell, and even harder to care. As for Stewart, she plays the part well enough, but there's something a bit cliched in the role that made it seem more like a bid to avoid typecasting than a genuine effort to show range outside the whole teenage vampire thing.

So in this sense, I was much more impressed by her performance as Joan Jett in The Runaways (pictured), a loose and slightly sanitised account of the rise and fall of the (today) little-known all-girl rock band who emerged from LA's rock scene in the mid-70s. It's not really about The Runaways, to be honest, since the screenplay was adapted from singer Cherie Currie's autobiography. Jett's story has been woven in, and the rest of the band – including Lita Ford, whose contribution to the band has been noticeably sidelined – simply appear as supporting players. As you might expect, it suffers all the problems that every rock biopic is plagued with (the rise of the band is charted through a montage of concert footage and newspaper headlines), but there's a nice spin on the inevitable writing-a-song scene when the lyrics to Cherry Bomb are improvised during a rehearsal.

Director Floria Sigismondi nicely captures the glam rock-suffused LA scene of the time, and gives a very male genre a fresh, female perspective, but the standout for me was Michael Shannon as impresario Kim Fowley, the flamboyant manager who plucked the girls from obscurity and mentored them with a cruel genius that bordered on psychopathic. Shannon commands the screen, stealing every scene he appears in, but the girls hold up well. Stewart makes an easy fit as Jett, the tomboy outsider who wants to jam with the guys (“Girls don't play electric guitars,” she is warned early on), but the real star for some will be another former child star, Dakota Fanning, who plays Currie. Fanning may seem a bit too china-doll fragile to play a rock chick, but, like Stewart, she's fearless about a role that could easily have sunk her, and her commitment carries her through unscathed. I was curious to see how Sigismondi would capture the chemistry between the two, and it's actually really quite sweet, culminating in what the tabloids like to call a lesbian love scene that feels neither tacky nor gratuitous.

I'm not sure how KStew's fanbase will take to seeing Bella kissing girls, snorting coke and grinding her crotch against a Stratocaster, but if The Runaways prompts at least one tweenie to bin her Miley Cyrus records and rock out, I think it will all have been worthwhile.