The Runaways, which takes place mainly in Southern California in the mid-1970s, evokes its moment and milieu with affectionate, almost uncanny fidelity. It’s a sun-baked teenage wasteland of muscle cars and hamburger stands, and the two young 21st-century movie stars who play the main characters seem to fit right in. Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart, who are Cherie Currie and Joan Jett, lead singer and guitarist for the band that gives the movie its name, were born a long time after the book had closed on the real-life Runaways, but the seriousness and self-confidence with which they tackle their roles goes a long way toward establishing a sense of authenticity.

It helps that Floria Sigismondi, a director of music videos who is making her feature debut, has a good ear and a sharp eye for period detail. Shot (by Benoît Debie) with a grainy, smeary look that evokes the decade as effectively as the clothes and haircuts, The Runaways balances nostalgia for wild bygone times with a cautionary sense of their less heroic side. Acknowledging the brazen, rebellious energy of rock ’n’ roll at the dawn of punk, Sigismondi also tallies the costs that an ardent, ambitious love of the music can exact.

The film is in effect a double biopic, chronicling the divergent fates of Jett (who is an executive producer) and Currie (whose memoir was the basis for the movie) as they learn how to play music and then how to handle fame. They start out as fans, but their aspirations to emulate their idols are blocked by long-standing sexism. “Girls can’t play the electric guitar,” a music teacher smugly informs Joan; Cherie, who worships David Bowie, is heckled and humiliated when she performs his song ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ at a school talent show.

Joan, a sullen, skinny glue-sniffer who suggests a young, androgynous Keith Richards, is the more disciplined of the two, but their big break comes courtesy of Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon), a promoter who takes the girls under his not entirely benevolent wing.

After Joan approaches him at a club with the idea of starting an all-girl rock band, Fowley recruits the timid, dreamy Cherie and a bunch of other young women and subjects them to a rigorous training regimen in a broken-down trailer. He teaches them to deal with hecklers, to howl and wail and strut just like their male idols, and preaches a passionate if self-contradictory brand of macho feminism. “This is not about women’s lib,” he crows, a rooster girding his chicks for battle. “It’s about women’s libido.”

Sigismondi, as she parses this distinction, is astute in recognising that the rise of the Runaways was fuelled by a volatile blend of empowerment and exploitation. The girls, well shy of their 18th birthdays, play their own instruments and write some of their own material, but their unscrupulous Svengali keeps all the control and most of the money. (Welcome to the music business!) And the version of girl pop that sells the band to record buyers and concertgoers is not exactly Hannah Montana, or even Britney Spears. They are advertised as ‘genuine jailbait’ and ‘braless,’ and presented to the world as kittenish tigresses — not role models but fetish objects.

— International Herald Tribune