PARK CITY, Utah — America’s favorite virginal vampire lover is on a quest to drive a stake into the heart of her image with two new bad-girl roles at the Sundance Film Festival.
It was less than 15 months ago that “Twilight” star Kristen Stewart awoke one morning to find herself famous. At 19, she’s still too young to drink, yet she has evidently decided she wanted to wake up at Sundance and find herself infamous.
“I’m going to cinematically deflower Dakota Fanning,” she bragged to Film.com while shooting the drugged-out, punked-up rock flick for girls who love girls, “The Runaways,” in which Stewart plays rocker Joan Jett in the 1970s.
SUNDANCE 2010: ‘RUNAWAYS’ ROCKS THE ROCKIES
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Stewart, who did a few fanzine roundtable interviews at the fest but declined to be interviewed for this story, was the dark angel of the snows in Park City this year.
As packs of teen fangirls stormed theaters for a glimpse of Stewart, the strains of sudden mega-fame were evident in the dutiful but reticent red-carpet performance by the teenager whose innumerable fan sites call her KStew. (Tip for freaking out your children: Refer to Robert Pattinson as RPattz.)
Turning the art-house celebration into Stewdance, she was gracious enough to show up for questions posed by fans at screenings. But her inarticulateness spoke volumes. Answering a question about her admiration for Jett, Stewart concluded with the words, “She’s like, pretty much, whatever. So . . . ” Stewart’s Sundance look — military-surplus jackets, plain gray hoodies and sneakers in an atmosphere where other actresses think nothing of preening in camisole tops despite the lashing cold — said serious indie artist, not paparazzi-ready starlet.
At the Q&A for “The Runaways,” she slouched in the background, hugging her shoulders, shifting her weight from one foot to the other and looking at the floor, while 15-year-old Fanning (who towered over the tiny Stewart, and has been dealing with fame for most of her life) took charge at the microphone as ably as a White House spokeswoman.
KStew’s other film at the fest, “Welcome to the Rileys,” casts her as a foulmouthed stripper and hooker who wears fishnets, X-shaped pasties over her breasts, a G-string and do-me high heels. On the red carpet, Stewart defended her decision to go for the edge, in halting terms.
“It’s really not like a stripper movie at all,” Stewart said to an MTV interviewer. “I think that, I don’t, I — I think it’s a really good story, I mean most ‘Twilight’ fans are young girls. This is a really, really good story for them.” Oh? Why? “Um, sort of like opens your eyes to people who just don’t have, who just don’t have, like, any options,” Stewart continued.
“I’m speaking really vaguely about it because it’s like, so awful, but yeah, that’s like the only way I could say it.”
The better movie by far is the very R-rated “The Runaways,” which features a couple of butch-femme makeout scenes between Stewart and Fanning that, despite their erotic power, don’t show a lot more than kissing and cuddling. The two actresses are filmed almost entirely from the neck up in a swirling, psychedelic haze of drugs and lust. (The film is due for release in March, but “Welcome to the Rileys” hasn’t found a distributor yet, so it has no release date.)
Floria Sigismondi, the writer and director of “The Runaways,” told the LA Times that Fanning’s character, Runaways lead singer Cherie Currie, mentioned in her autobio that Jett was really good in bed. “I thought, I have to pry into that a bit,” she said. “It will cause an explosion in the film. Why not go there?”
As Jett, Stewart climbs the wall of a recording studio like a caged monkey. She trashes musical instruments, screaming at bandmates and manager.
But this is her on relatively good behavior. She spends the movie strutting around in black-leather studded bracelets and dog collars and leather trousers that are practically painted on. The movie might as well have been called “Rock Bitches in Heat” for its crazed, substance-fueled antics.
Stewart-as-Jett snorts coke, toys menacingly with a switchblade and, in the most memorable and mechanically triumphant scene in the movie, wee-wees on an enemy band’s guitar while standing up as it sits innocently in its guitar stand.
But that isn’t the worst news for moms of Twihard tweens and teens. The really alarming Stewart character is in “Welcome to the Rileys.”
In this family drama, James Gandolfini plays a lonely Midwesterner having difficulty connecting with his wife after their daughter dies. In New Orleans, he meets a physically and emotionally bruised 16-year-old stripper/hooker played by Stewart.
Lovely Bella talks dirty and casually offers her sexual services to the Gandolfini character, a strait-laced gentleman who tries to redeem her by taking her under his wing and agreeing to pay her $100 a day to stay away from trouble (but fining her every time she drops the F-bomb, which is frequently).
Be afraid, moms. Be very, very afraid.
“Mom, why can’t I wear fishnets like Bella?”
“Mom, what’s a steamy Sapphic sex scene like the one I read about in The Post?”
“Mom, I want to start an all-girl rock band. Drugs look fun!”
If there is a bright spot for parents, it’s this: “Welcome to the Rileys” is so thematically derivative and dramatically inert that it’s unlikely to make it into many theaters or attract much of an audience to see Stewart’s not particularly convincing trip to the demimonde.
And in “The Runaways,” at least, which isn’t hugely commercial but should draw a decent-size audience, Stewart’s Joan Jett is actually the moral center of the film, a hardworking professional who derides Fanning’s Currie for not having artistic integrity and participating in sexually charged photo shoots.
“Publicize the music, not your crotch!” she screams at Fanning. So says the actress who takes a vial of drugs out of her crotch in one Sundance movie and offers lap dances in the other.