The Girls Who Kicked in Rock’s Door

THE most striking thing about “The Runaways,” a new film about the trailblazing bad-girl rock band from the 1970s that spawned Joan Jett, is how authentic it feels. The clubs are properly scuzzy. The dialogue is properly raunchy. The actors can properly sing. The hair is fried and feathered, the skin spotty from weeks of running on little but potato chips and estrogen. From the adrenaline rush of performing to the monotony of rehearsal, it’s a vivid snapshot of life on the road for ambitious teenagers who are constantly told that rock ’n’ roll “is the sport of men.” (And that’s their own manager talking.)

Richard Perry/The New York Times

Floria Sigismondi, who directed “The Runaways,” has also made music videos, including one for David Bowie. Cherie Currie and Joan Jett, of the real-life Runaways, were also huge Bowie fans.

One reason may be that the movie is partly based on “Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway” (Harper Collins), a newly revamped autobiography by the group’s lead singer Cherie Currie, whose chillingly quick self-destruction is relived through Dakota Fanning. Another may be that Ms. Currie and Ms. Jett (played by Kristen Stewart) put the actors through hard-rock boot camp for several weeks before filming. And Floria Sigismondi, the writer and director, has “been around music all my life,” as she said in an interview in a hotel room in Midtown. Along with making videos for artists like David Bowie (Ms. Currie’s musical hero) and the White Stripes, she’s worked in clubs and gone on tour with her husband’s band, the Living Things. “I wanted it all to look real. I wanted bed head. I wanted freckles and pimples,” she said of the film, her first feature. The words she kept repeating on the set were “raw” and “gritty.”
The rock lifestyle has been notoriously difficult to get right on film. The mainstream fantasy — sex, drugs, hard-core partying — usually trumps the more tedious reality of musicians striving for success but often becoming trapped by it. The result has been films that end up either bloated and cartoonish (see the American Indian shaman following Jim Morrison around “The Doors”), sweetly sanitized (see the intercourse-avoiding groupies of “Almost Famous”) or as road-to-ruin predictable as “Behind the Music.” But since 2002, when the hyperactive “24 Hour Party People” captured the dance-oriented music scene in ’70s and ’80s Manchester, England, there has been a trickle of rock biopics that get the milieu and the music just right, like “Control,” the story of Joy Division, and “What We Do Is Secret,” the story of the Germs.
“The Runaways” is the rare movie to address the female rock experience. Until now the touchstone has been the fictional 1982 cult film “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains,” a look at three skunk-haired female punks who make proclamations like “Every girl should be given an electric guitar on her 16th birthday.”
“It’s very hard to make a film about popular musicians, or music as the subject in any context,” said Jack White of the White Stripes in an e-mail message. “You could trust Floria to find the right angle because she has no need to oversell the subject.”
Ms. Sigismondi, 44, earned her first big buzz as a video director in 1997 after strapping Marilyn Manson into stilts and gruesome dental gear for the “Beautiful People” clip. She looks like a rock star herself, dressed in slim-fitting black pants and a black sweater, her long, slightly-goth hair fanning over a furry caveman vest. Simultaneously cool and effervescent, she is easy to imagine directing arty musicians like Bjork, Sigur Ros and Interpol as well as pop divas like Christina Aguilera, which she did.
Born in Italy to opera singers, Ms. Sigismondi moved to Canada with her family when she was 2. She grew up doing her homework in opera houses, surrounded by people in costume, she said, and dreamed of becoming a painter. After art college she embarked on a career as a fashion and art photographer; her work has been widely exhibited and collected in two books. In the early 1990s a production company suggested she make the leap into directing music videos. “Instead of coming up with one image, I had to come up with 100 images,” she said. “But I loved it right away. Now I was able to be more conceptual.”
The biggest legend she has ever worked with is Mr. Bowie. The video for his 1997 song “Little Wonder” is a quick-cut barrage of eyeballs, eye patches and aliens. “Floria is a real force of nature, never short of ideas, and meticulous in the way she brings them into play,” Mr. Bowie said in an e-mail message. “She’s also a little bit crazy, in a dark way, which in a working situation is just fine with me.”
While shooting a video for the Living Things in Prague in 2004, she met her future husband, Lillian Berlin, the lead singer and guitarist of the alternative rock band. They married in a park in Toronto and exchanged their vows on a cross made of red rose petals. Their daughter is named Tosca, after the opera.
Based in Los Angeles, Ms. Sigismondi came to the project, made for less than $10 million, after her manager introduced her to two of the producers, Art and John Linson. (Art produced films like “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “Fight Club”; John, his son, produced “Lords of Dogtown,” about ’70s skaters.)
“When we met Floria she was undeniable, even though she hadn’t directed a film before,” Art said in a telephone interview. “If you’ve met her and you’ve seen her work, you see that she’s got a spectacular eye, she’s got great style and she’s got the heart of a girl.” Both producers thought a female director was crucial. “We felt from the beginning that this is really a tale of two young girls” — Cherie and Joan — “getting in way over their heads in a world they knew very little about, a man’s world, and there’s a price to pay for that,” he said. “We thought: It’s got to come from the heart of another woman.”
Though “The Runaways” follows the general trajectory of the band, Ms. Sigismondi also considers the movie more of a coming-of-age story than a definitive biopic, focusing on the relationship among Cherie, Joan and Kim Fowley, the band’s insult-spewing male manager (Michael Shannon). In the film Cherie struggles with her twin sister, a sick alcoholic father, addiction and instant notoriety. Above all, Ms. Sigismondi said, she is a young girl trying to define herself in a high-pressure world of excess, with little adult guidance. “It’s a cautionary tale on Cherie’s side and an inspirational tale on Joan’s side,” she said. (After the Runaways broke up in 1979, Ms. Jett had a monster No. 1 hit with a 1982 cover of “I Love Rock ’n Roll.”)