Last night I watched The Runaways, a film about the band of the same name that I really enjoyed. The story was a bit thin, but I really enjoyed Kristin Stewart’s performance as Joan Jett and Michael Shannon as Kim Fowley. (I also completely failed to notice that Alia Shawkat played the bass player until her name came up in the end credits.)
I can’t think of any other films about women musicians or groups, but I’m now really in the mood to watch another (or several others). I’m not fussed about era, style, protagonists or anything – if there’s a great film about a woman troubadour in the 1200s I’d love to hear about it. What films about women musicians would you recommend?
Breaking Glass with Hazel O’Conner was set in the post-punk era. I enjoyed Bandslam quite a bit. But if you want to see a film with some female players who can really play, you need to see Rock School. Note, that is Rock School, not School of Rock, which is the Hollywood film ripping off the real thing. It is an amazing documentary about dedicated teachers and talented kids.
Looking at the IMDB listings, it really is sad how few stories about female musicians Hollywood has produced.
If you wouldn’t object to a show rather than a movie about a fictional female musician, I recommend Instant Star. I believe it’s on Netflix streaming. I haven’t watch it yet, but I’ve also heard good things about the recently ended show Rita Rocks.
Say what you will about Bette Midler, but she was a knockout in The Rose, a fictional movie VERY loosely based on Janis Joplin.
There’s Ni Change Rien (Change Nothing), a very unusual and slow, but fascinating, behind-the-scenes documentary about the interesting French chanteuse Jeanne Balibar getting ready to record an album. There’s no narration, just very languid scenes of rehearsals and pre-recording performances. Here are a couple of clips: Part 1 and Part 2. If those bore the tears out of you you’d hate it. It’s all very laid back like that. My favorite scene isn’t on YouTube, where they are rehearsing a song and work with it getting it exactly perfect. It’s a fascinating process, one we rarely see. It’s sly too, in that it’s filmed in a very arty, noir style befitting the finished product, but it’s all in the rehearsal stage. I think that says that the process is as important and worthy of respect as the finished product. Here are a couple moreclips.
This isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, but there’s a movie about Hildegard of Bingen called Vision. Hildegard was an amazing woman, a writer, composer, botanist, and philosopher to scratch the surface. Her compositions are stunning and her music interests me most about her. Unfortunately the movie treats her music as an afterthought and focuses mostly on her ocular migranes, er, excuse me, visions from god. It’s still interesting though and it is filled wall to wall with her music, though if you didn’t know in advance, you wouldn’t know that it was mostly her music.
Ahh, Bandslam, one of my favourite movies from the past couple of years.
One of my favourite movies of all time though is Josie and the Pussycats – yeah, don’t trust the critics or your friends or even yourself if you’ve seen it before and hated it – it’s an utter masterwork.
Satisfaction is about a girl band trying to become successful. At the time it was made it was a Justine Bateman vehicle but it also had Julia Roberts and Liam Neeson early in their careers. Not a great movie but good,