On a frigid Sunday night at the end of the Sundance Film Festival's first weekend, a massive, mostly female crowd braved the cold to line up outside Park City High School, shuffling in place to keep toes from going numb. As those in the line slowly advanced into the school's Eccles Theater, the biggest and most prestigious venue at Sundance, they took tiny geisha steps through partially frozen slush, past dozens of desperate souls holding cardboard signs bearing beggar slogans like "Need tickets!!!"
Fanning and Stewart as The Runaways' Cherie Currie and Joan Jett
Annette Bening and Mark Ruffalo in Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right, the biggest sale at Sundance this year
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You hear stories about how Sundance films of yore inspired a kind of popular mania on the ground in Park City, moving regular folks without industry ties to stand out in the freezing cold for hours, sometimes begging a stranger with an extra ticket to do them a kindness, sometimes offering top dollar for scalped tickets. The movies attached to such lore are usually out-of-nowhere phenoms, truly independent films that came to Sundance without distribution and left 10 days later primed to become pop-culture sensations: sex, lies and videotape, Clerks, The Blair Witch Project. The films pumped a vein that hadn't been tapped before, and the hype that swelled around them was about getting in on the ground floor of a discovery.
Flash forward to 2010, and the movie that's attracted the scalping scene outside Eccles is The Runaways, a stylish biopic of the all-teen girl band of the same name. Directed by music-video auteur Floria Sigismondi, the film has been the subject of blog gossip since preproduction, thanks to the "controversial" casting of the questionably punk-teen Twilight starlet Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett. Earlier that day, gossip blogs traded paparazzi photos of Stewart stepping out of her private jet in Park City. The mania outside this premiere could be about a number of things — Twilight fandom, '70s proto-punk fandom, curiosity sparked by the trailer's glimpse of maturing child star Dakota Fanning playing a drugged-out nymphet who stumbles around in Fredericks of Hollywood stripper-wear as outerwear — but it is not about the bragging rights of helping to discover something new. This Runaways scene would seem to be about as far away from Sundance's roots as you could get.
Yet, inside the theater, before the film begins, a kind of video installation broadcasting Sundance's theme for the year is projected onto the big screen. Slogans, fading up in a fuzzy spray of multicolored dot matrix–like digital graffiti, declare Sundance's mission to re-embrace its underground roots. "This is the renewed cinematic rebellion" fades down; "This is the recharged fight against the establishment of the unexpected" fades up. Visually, this feels like a nod to the artist Jenny Holzer, who uses LED displays and silent radio scrolls to insert manifesto fragments she calls "truisms" into public space. But what feels true in Holzer's work seems facile and phony in Park City. If you have to create a bombastic light show to broadcast your punk-rock credentials, how punk can you really be?
One thing becomes certain as the filmmakers take the stage to introduce the movie: Between the real Joan Jett's red sequined pants and Sigismondi's minidress and heels, the Runaways crew is certainly rebelling against the standard Sundance igloo casual dress code. Too bad their rebellion doesn't extend to the movie itself, which instead traffics in vintage sex, drugs and rock & roll cliché.
That's not entirely a bad thing: The Runaways was one of a half-dozen films at Sundance this year that offered the pure pleasures of a star-studded mainstream movie made for a mature audience. (Others included The Company Men and The Kids Are All Right, which sparked the year's sole old-fashioned bidding war.) Easy entertainment — this is cinematic rebellion?
In one way, it is: The Runaways is the kind of movie that Hollywood should be making but isn't; the kind of film that studio-supported indie labels like Miramax and New Line used to make, before most of those art-house divisions were shuttered. These days, a certain type of midrange star vehicle — low budget by Hollywood standards but exponentially glossier and more expensive to make than the average film-festival indie — is being made almost chiefly by independent production companies, and premiered at film festivals in the hopes that well-funded buyers will be attracted by critical acclaim and audience "buzz." (When studios do deign to make these kinds of movies, such as Up in the Air, they still take them to festivals in search of indie cred and awards prestige.) As the whole of the country stumbles through economic tribulation, the film industry has lost its middle class, and the film festival that this year marketed itself as the locus of a "cinematic rebellion" has become a crucial platform for the kind of film that used to be commercial. Call it a market-based irony.
Five years ago, Sundancers were welcomed at Salt Lake City Airport by a giant banner over baggage claim, advertising a once-giant weekly entertainment magazine produced by a still-fairly-giant media company. Today that magazine is barely as thick as a pamphlet. Three years ago, Volkswagen took over a centrally located building on Main Street, for the apparent purpose of handing out absurd swag. (Then a starving film blogger, I ate New Beetle–shaped pasta for weeks.) This year, free stuff was generally harder to come by. But while the Main Street party scene suddenly slowed midweek, theater crowds stayed steady (a screening of buzzy social-media doc Catfish on the festival's second Thursday filled every seat, with dozens of wait-listers turned away). In the festival's final days, films began to sell, which was a surprise. After endless "hard times" hype, every sale announcement had the aura of a tiny miracle.
