Like many a musical odyssey (Help!, Velvet Goldmine, SpiceWorld), this story of the Runaways' volatile tenure zips through a scene or two of a band on the move. Near the beginning, a snarling guitarist named Joan Larkin races down an anonymous street, jetting toward her new name. Later, the group flees a door-smashing horde of female fans in Tokyo, a moment of visceral hysteria -- and one mirroring the recklessness and raw energy of the band members themselves. At once an alluring tribute and a cautionary tale, the movie depicts their every success and failure as the fate of very fast girls.

Expanding her music video vocabulary, director Floria Sigismondi riffs imaginatively on how style can be substance when it comes to adolescent self-transformation. Joan Jett (Stewart, capturing the guitarist's spring-loaded crouch and the defiant jut of her chin) makes herself over as an androgynous Brando, and underage frontwoman Cherie Currie (Fanning) initially masks her baby-soft neediness behind David Bowie makeup.

The idea of turning her into a sleaze version of Brigitte Bardot comes from manager Kim Fowley, played by a creepy and regularly scene-stealing Michael Shannon. Glistening with sweat, lip gloss, and a sense of slime, this Svengali variously sweet-talks the girls into compliance and employs verbal abuse as a management technique.

The Runaways rehashes (and often refreshes) all the usual biopic tropes -- the try-and-try-again composition of future hits, the studio shouting matches. It even almost gets away with a scene of the young rebels swigging liquor under the big white H in the Hollywood Hills. While the offstage passion between Jett and Currie gives the film its emotional drive, their in-concert erotic aggression is an occasion for elegantly examining the line between self-expression and self-exploitation -- and "between women's lib and women's libido," as Fowley says after masterminding the hit "Cherry Bomb," which produced a brief pop explosion, complete with collateral damage.

By Troy Patterson