ongoing

 Whether you were a rock fan in 1975 – or whether you weren’t even conceived – you’re going to want to take in “The Runaways,” the biopic made Floria Sigismondi, starring Kristen Stewart as guitarist-singer Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning as singer Cherie Currie. Yes, it has the rock rise ‘n’ fall arc we all know too well – (premature) fame, drugs, sex, highs that are too high and lows that are too low – but it’s got unexpected grit and veracity, too. Sure, there are omissions – the bassist is a composite character and the book is based on Currie’s “Neon Angel,” so she and Jett are heavily focused upon. But it’s a great ride through a controversial band – a manufactured band, in some ways, and a very real one.
   We spoke with Currie for a Herald story that ran earlier in the week (www.bostonherald.com). Here’s an expanded version of that piece.

      “I had just been to the David Bowie ‘Diamond Dogs’ concert,” Currie said, “and I kid you not: When I watched him on stage a lightning bolt came out of the sky and zapped me. I knew at that moment that’s what I wanted to do with my life. It was my calling. A couple of weeks later, I met Joan Jett and Kim Fowley in a club, and all of a sudden this amazing offer comes to me. I’m thinking is “This is all I want to do.’ I jumped at the chance.”
    So began the rock ‘n’ roll life of Currie – then 15 – with the all-girl, all-teenaged rock band the Runaways.
    In a half-hour, guitarist-singer Jett and producer-manager Fowley wrote a song for her, the confrontational, sexually charged rocker “Cherry Bomb.”
   “What a great way to be rebellious,” Currie said. “Go up onstage singing those lyrics in your underwear. It doesn’t get any better than that, being underage at the same time. You just can’t push the envelope any more than that.”
    Currie told her tale in a co-written book that came out in 1989 as a “young adult” book. She and Tony O’Neill rewrote her story, much more explicitly, in the just published  “Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway Angel.”
      It’s a book that Jett’s manager and business partner Kenny Laguna shepherded to market and then helped get made into the biopic, “The Runaways.”
    Currie never thought her book would be published, to say nothing of a movie being made from it. “Kenny got quite a bit of resistance,” she said. “People didn’t seem to be interested in the Runaways or in another recovering alcoholic drug addict.”
    Currie’s addiction began in the Runaways days and continued until she got sober in 1984. “I was thrown into a tornado at a very young age,” she said, “and thrown out of it into another small storm, the acting business.”
    She was in “Foxes” and “Twilight Zone: The Movie.” But the acting career fell apart, too. She worked as a clerk in a linen store, as a drug counselor and a physical therapist. For the past nine years, she’s been a chainsaw artist, carving figures out of logs.
   She’s watched “The Runaways” half a dozen times.
  “Visually,” Currie said, “it’s great to watch. It’s very edgy and hardcore, the way it really was.”
    Why did Currie want to revisit her life, again, in print? 
   “I’m a 50-year-old woman,” she said, “someone that isn’t afraid anymore to say that’s what we did, with all those stories we couldn’t tell.”
   “To give you an example, there’s Kim Fowley’s ‘sex education’ class. He forced us to watch him have sex to teach us how to do it right. Listen, I’ll tell you, Kim Fowley in his holey 100-year-old underwear is not a vision I will relish the rest of my life.”
   That chapter didn’t make the movie, though other tawdry things did. There’s the Svengali-like Fowley, virtually smacking his lips over his creation, saying, “Jail fucking bait! Jack fucking pot!”
   He also granted an interview to a rock magazine where he said the best thing that could happen to the Runaways would be if Currie committed suicide. (That’s in the movie.)
    Currie ran into Fowley at a Hollywood party in 2008 and made peace.  “For some reason,” she said, “I didn’t have that anger towards him anymore. I think it came from while I was working on my book, I kind of forgave myself for all the things I had done in my life. Therefore, you kind of automatically forgive everyone else, too.
   “We had a long talk for a couple of hours. He apologized. He admitted he didn’t know how to handle young teenage girls. We all have skeletons in the closet. It’s time to realize we all were young at one time and we’re adults now. We’ve been there and done that.”
    I remember the Runaways were the targets of some very nasty attacks in the rock press. An infamous review in Creem started with the line, “These bitches suck.”
    Does she remember?
    “That’s all I remember,” said Currie. “Of course, you always remember the negative stuff first, ‘cause there was so much of it. Magazines like Creem had it out for us. Guys just had problems with girls coming into their territory.”
    How did the Runaways react?
    “Joan’s reply to the Creem was ‘Come over here and I’ll kick your fucking ass in.’”
What was Currie’s relationship with Jett? (There’s a brief makeout scene between them in the movie. Jett, I don’t think, has never come out as a lesbian, but she certainly is a lesbian icon.)
  “Oh, me and Joan roomed together,” said Currie. “We were best friends. But we just got so tired and we stopped communicating. We were kids. In the two years together we never had a break. I was getting most of publicity ‘cause I was the lead singer and they were focusing on that corset for the two minutes I wore it during the entire show. And that gets under your skin when you’re young teen-agers growing up, trying to find out who you are, and you’re tired, you’re constantly having it thrown in your face that you’re not as good as or not pretty. Young girls get jealous. It’s natural. Unfortunately, I felt that way as well, I’m not saying it was all them. I felt that jealousy.
     Currie says her rock dreams are gone. But …
    “You accept those things in life<’ she said. “You don’t fit a square peg in a round hole and I watched people do that around me all my life. They just keep trying and trying. It’s, like, ‘get over it, move on to something else. That’s what I did. I became a mom and that’s the best.”
   Nevertheless, she’s got a band together, with her 19-year-old guitarist son Jake, and will open a few dates for Joan Jett & the Blackhearts in August.
    “I’m not making any kind of comeback,” Currie said. “I know this business way too well. I’m too old, but I’m gonna get out there and have a great time.”

The movie will cost you about $10 and is at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, among others.

www.coolidge.org