Month: April 2010

The Price of Free Hey, Memphis Zoo, welcome to my world.

Post author By John Branston
Post date April 8, 2010

Free is one of the biggest issues of our time.

Free makes it easier to do my job. But Free holds down my earnings and could cost me my job sooner or later. Free made this newspaper possible. Now Free is killing newspapers.

Free shouldn’t be taken lightly. Like marriage, early retirement, and poker tournaments, it should be entered into thoughtfully. You should probably get some counseling before you mess around with Free. Free can be a bitch.

Books have been written about Free. Economists and psychologists have studied Free to death. A Google search is free. Google’s founders say information should be free. They do not, however, work for free. Google is a $23 billion company.

Parents and kids have pondered Free and Not Free since the invention of the allowance.

So I sympathize with the Memphis Zoo, which learned the hidden costs of Free last week when all those kids showed up.

Admission to the zoo, normally $15 if you’re over 11, is free on Tuesday afternoons. Last Tuesday was sort of a Festival of Free. Spring break means free time. The weather was cloud-free. The thrill of being part of a crowd so big that cops and television crews came over to take a look was also free.

Free day is a tradition predating the Memphis Zoological Society’s 1994 contract with the city. It was originally on Saturday, then on Monday. Last week the zoo and the mayor made some changes including no free days during March and a requirement that kids 16 and under have a chaperone 21 or older. But this will put a burden on the zoo staff (“Let me see your IDs, who’s the chaperone, who’s with who?”), and it ignores the problem of neighborhood encroachment the other 11 months of the year.

Another idea might work. Make free day dollar day. Or, as a reader suggested, “TN Twos-day” for $2.

We value things differently when we have to pay for them, even a small amount. Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, wrote about this in his book Free: The Future of a Radical Price.

“It’s as if our brains were wired to raise a flag. … If you charge a price, any price, we are forced to ask ourselves if we really want to open our wallets. But if the price is zero, that flag never goes up and the decision just got easier.”

The students who came to the zoo on free day were making a rational economic choice. Free beats $15. Would they have come if the price was $1 or $2? Or would they have come to Overton Park and just hung out, which raises other issues?

My guess is that what economists call the “mental transaction costs” would keep a lot of people away. I bet most of those kids showed up last week to see the crowd, not the animals.

The zoo and other public facilities have a touchy problem on their hands when it comes to Free. Some of my neighbors in Midtown think the zoo should build a parking garage to handle the overflow of cars. But I think they’re overlooking the problem of Free. A parking garage would charge $5 or more and would not be hassle-free when crowded. A zoo spokesman says shuttles are being considered, but people shun them when there are alternatives. If you park on the streets, it’s close and free.

Concerts at the Levitt Shell in Overton Park are free, and the crowds are generally modest in size and demeanor. Maybe some evening there will be a flash mob of aging baby boomers and hippies. Wait, we already did that 40 years ago.

Free doesn’t work for some things. Musicians learn early on the perils of Free. Mud Island River Park went Free but still has a hard time drawing crowds. You couldn’t give away free tickets to University of Memphis football games or Memphis Redbirds games the last couple of years. You can’t give away magazines either, so publishers charge premium prices on newsstands and bargain prices for annual subscriptions, plus a free gift. You can give away newspapers like this one, because our advertisers pay good money. By putting this column on our website before putting it in the paper, I may be undercutting them. And bloggers and news aggregators may be undercutting me.

Free is hard. I wish the zoo luck.

Politics Politics Feature

Last Man Standing

Post author By Jackson Baker
Post date April 8, 2010

CREDIT: JB

Mike McWherter

NASHVILLE — As Jackson businessman Mike McWherter noted almost matter-of-factly last Thursday, in a brief speech from the steps of the Capitol after filing his papers to run for governor, “I’m going to be the Democratic nominee.”

He will, because the last remaining obstacle to his nomination, former House majority leader Kim McMillan of Clarksville, dropped out of the governor’s race the day before to run instead for mayor of Clarksville. McMillan’s departure followed previous ones from state senator Roy Herron of Dresden, Nashville businessman Ward Cammack, and state Senate Democratic leader Jim Kyle of Memphis.

In leaving the race, both Cammack and Kyle signaled their recognition that ultimate victory for them this year would be difficult. Herron’s departure was another matter: He dropped out to pursue a race for Congress in the 8th District following incumbent Democrat John Tanner‘s announcement last year that he would not seek another term.

Since Herron’s hankering to be in Congress was a long-known fact, there were some, both in the media and among state politicos, who speculated openly that Tanner might have had some persuasion to exit, at least two years earlier than expected, from a onetime mentor. That would be former Tennessee governor Ned McWherter, the current candidate’s father, who served from 1987 to 1995.

Whether true or not, the former governor’s presence is an inescapable component of Mike McWherter’s campaign. He is sure to be on the stump with his son from time to time, and he was referred to twice by candidate McWherter on Thursday. One mention included the phrase “a lesson my father taught me”; the other cited “an important lesson I really learned from my father growing up.”

One thing Mike McWherter might have learned was the importance in a Tennessee statewide election of appearing as down-home and locally oriented as possible.

Hence the candidate’s emphasis in his remarks Thursday on “Tennessee jobs,” in the pursuit of which he promises a tax break to those entrepreneurs and Tennesseans who create job opportunities for citizens of the state.

Hence too, McWherter’s emphasis in a “hard times” environment on debunking the job-creation claims of Knoxville mayor Bill Haslam, the well-heeled Pilot Oil scion who could well be his Republican opponent.

“Tennessee needs a governor who actually knows what you’re going through,” McWherter said, then took a shot at claims made in Haslam’s widely seen first statewide commercial.

“These are times that require more from a candidate than juggling numbers on a TV ad to inflate his accomplishments,” McWherter said. “Tennesseans will see through those tricks. They’ll take the measure of the man, and they’ll say, ‘If he’s gonna stretch the truth about jobs, then how can we trust him on this economy?’ We need a governor who has met a payroll, who knows what it’s like to provide health-care benefits for the people that he works with in good times and in bad, a governor who’s created jobs, a governor who from day one knows what it will take to create more jobs.”

And, just to be on the safe side of a once and possible future issue, McWherter vowed to oppose a state income tax.

Elaborating on that latter point in a session with reporters after his speech, McWherter said the state had a “consumption-based” economy and noted that three years ago, during a favorable business climate, had enough spillover revenues from the state sales tax that members of the General Assembly were able to vote themselves surplus sums to bestow on projects in their districts.

Though his public remarks had included no reference to Republican candidates other than Haslam, McWherter contended he didn’t know who the GOP nominee might be but noted that the other Republican candidates — Chattanooga congressman Zach Wamp and Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey of Blountville — had also been critical of the veracity of Haslam’s long-running first television ad.

McWherter said he probably will wait until after the primary to start his own television advertising.

Although up until now McWherter has been somewhat less visible than other candidates, he contends that he has already visited all 95 Tennessee counties. In any case, McWherter’s Monday statewide flyover looks to be the start of a long-term acquaintanceship.

Editorial Opinion

What’s In It For Us?

Post author By Flyer Staff
Post date April 8, 2010

Last week we editorialized concerning provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that directly benefited the Med. This week we’ll summarize some of the bill’s other positive features.

Notable is that the act puts an end to “pre-existing conditions” as a reason for denying health-insurance coverage. Aside from the general relief granted by this provision, it gives some of those thousands disenrolled from TennCare in the last few years access to acceptable private health insurance.

The act provides tax credits for businesses with fewer than 50 employees in order to facilitate their ability to make health coverage available. It also extends the cut-off age for children on their parents’ health-insurance plans to age 26, an invaluable concession in this age of extended education and high unemployment.

The infamous “doughnut hole” in Medicare prescription-drug benefits — whereby a gap in coverage formerly existed past a certain point, requiring a patient to go out of pocket — is no more. Also abolished are the caps on the amount of health insurance an individual can acquire during a lifetime, as well as the odious practice of “recissions” by insurers, whereby individuals who have been naughty enough to make claims could be arbitrarily dropped from coverage.

Another boon to consumers is the bill’s making mandatory in new insurance plans the inclusion of appeals procedures in the case of denied claims or benefits deemed insufficient. Also mandatory will be coverage for preventive-care plans.

To be sure, the final bill suffers from there being no “public option,” whereby the government itself could provide a fallback basic-insurance plan by means of keeping the insurance companies honest. As things stand, health-insurance coverage is still in the hands of private, profit-making enterprises, and while several of the companies have admirable records in making health insurance available and in paying off legitimate claims, the fact is that their coverage is still dependent on cost considerations, not all of which, to say the least, work to the insured’s benefit.

But that adage about the perfect being the enemy of the good may apply here. While debate will continue as to just how “good” the new law is, it’s undeniably better than what we had before. Rejoice.

April Madness

What a wonderful event, right? The NCAA tournament just concluded was one of the best ever, loaded with heart-warming upsets and glorious down-to-the-wire conclusions. Appropriately, the championship game itself featured one of the mid-major overachievers, Butler University, versus one of the game’s established powerhouses, Duke, and it, too, could have been won by a buzzer-beater. And let us admit that we were as satisfied by the comeuppance received by John Calipari’s team of one-and-done semi-pro athletes wearing Kentucky blue as we were oblivious to the consequences of the opportunistic coach’s fielding such a team for all those years in Tiger blue. Maybe the University of Memphis has learned from the experience, which resulted in humbling NCAA sanctions.

In any case, we look forward to the prospects for next year under Josh Pastner, whose best-in-the-nation recruiting class has surely been vetted for any potential irregularities. We want some more of that tournament madness for ourselves.

Opinion Viewpoint

Domestic Violence 101

Post author By Joe Conason
Post date April 8, 2010

When the Department of Homeland Security released a cautiously worded report on the potential dangers of right-wing extremism last April, the talk-radio wingnuts and certain Republican lawmakers went into spasms of indignation. Clearly, that report — an innocuous nine-page document commissioned by the previous Republican administration — had been conjured up by White House Democrats to smear conservatives.

“There is not one instance they can cite as evidence where any of these right-wing groups have done anything,” Rush Limbaugh told his listeners.

A year later, we know that Limbaugh was wrong (again). Up in northern Michigan, the Hutaree militants were collecting weapons and ammunition and allegedly plotting the assassination of law enforcement officers with the same kind of roadside bombs and projectiles used by terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan. The difference is that those groups claim to be Muslim; the violent extremists over here prefer to be known as Christian.

We also know that the recent outbreak of window smashing against Democrats in the aftermath of the passage of health-care reform can be traced to a militia activist from Alabama. He justified urging those attacks on his website as a warning that America is on the brink of mass violence. It is a theme he has promoted for more than a decade, dating back to the militia movement of the Clinton years, when he authored a pamphlet titled “Strategy and Tactics for a Militia Civil War.”

Now, nobody is likely to apologize to Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano, the victim of a smear by those who claimed she was trying to intimidate those who call themselves conservative. But while the Hutaree conspiracy charges are very troubling, as was the window-smashing spree, there are still more disturbing signals coming from the far right.

One of the men arrested in the Hutaree group used the screen name “Pale Horse” when he posted material on militia websites. Having attached himself to the Hutaree and other militia outfits, he apparently was obsessed with gruesome child murders and serial killing. Under his pseudonym, Pale Horse circulated a YouTube video last year that advocated an armed militia march on Washington:

“A peaceful demonstration of at least a million — hey, if we can get 10 million, even better — but at least one million armed militia men marching on Washington. A peaceful demonstration. No shooting, no one gets hurt. Just a demonstration. The only difference from any typical demonstration is we will all be armed.”

Now it appears Pale Horse’s plan — or something very similar — may actually occur on April 19th, the anniversary of the first shots fired at Lexington and Concord and, perhaps not coincidentally, of the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building by Timothy McVeigh.

Militia websites are currently promoting a “restore the Constitution rally” at two locations in northern Virginia where the marchers can legally carry firearms. They plan to “muster” at Fort Hunt National Park, about 12 miles south of the nation’s capital, and then travel in “small convoys” to a park near Reagan National Airport, just over the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. This will let them “step up to the edge” with their weapons, as the organizers put it.

Although the militia marchers are acting within their rights, their intentions seem not terribly far from those of the window smashers. Among them, there may well be groups and lone nuts whose seditious plans resemble those of the Hutaree. As the militias enact Pale Horse’s fantasy, they appear determined to intimidate every American who disagrees with their interpretation of the Constitution and their rancorous hatred of the president and the Democratic Party.

So, perhaps Napolitano can take some satisfaction from the fresh evidence that her critics were wrong and that the report on right-wing extremism was, if anything, too mild. Neither she nor any other official in government should be deterred from exposing the extremists who threaten public security and constitutional democracy, regardless of ideology.

Joe Conason writes for The New York Observer.

Music Music Features

Sucker Punch

Post author By Chris Herrington
Post date April 8, 2010

When you’re out drinking on your own, heartaches from the past feel overblown,” Harlan T. Bobo croons on “Sweet Life,” the lead song on his third album, Sucker, set to be released by the local Goner label on April 16th.

Bobo might be referencing his local-classic debut album, Too Much Love, with those lines — or, more likely, the life experiences that spurred that album. The lyrical assertion feels like wisdom, and Bobo’s three albums form a perhaps unintentional trilogy that builds to the romantic and domestic contentment found on Sucker.

Bobo can be guarded — a reluctant participant in the marketing necessities of a music career. But whatever artifice and honest distance have gone into his persona, Bobo’s music is direct, personal (“Yeah, too personal,” he says), and easy to embrace.

Too Much Love was an accessible but unnervingly intimate collection of songs tracking one delicate but troubled romance. Bobo’s follow-up, 2007’s I’m Your Man, was a braver, pricklier, funnier record that seemed to be partly rooted in doubts about his debut’s appeal. On that album’s standout, “So Bad,” Bobo daydreamed wistfully of building a family, as if time had run out on that proposition.

Apparently it hadn’t, as Sucker — its title joyfully tongue-in-cheek — seems to be inspired by the courtship of Bobo’s wife, Anne Ciriani, and the birth of their now eight-month-old son. As such, the album completes a personal and musical journey begun with the lovelorn Too Much Love.

“I was pretty seriously after it about five years ago. I really wanted it,” Bobo says of the family urge that inspired “So Bad.” “Then I got really content just hanging out in my apartment making music. Then I met Anne, and I swear to God we were trying to have a child like the first week we met. It was already there. It was underneath everything.”

Bobo met the woman who would become his wife while on a European tour with fellow local musicians Jack Oblivian and John Paul Keith, and Bobo’s new family has split time between Memphis and Perpignon, France, where Ciriani owns an ice-cream shop on the beach at Argeles. Sucker references both the meeting and courtship and the travels that have ensued.

“It’s mostly just that period of meeting her and traveling,” Bobo says of the record’s inspiration. “There’s some fiction in there, but it’s tied up in all that. I might be the only person who cares, but it’s the movement of places and where things are written. Every song seems to have the feel of where it was written.”

Fittingly, the tone here is lighter, if not without complication. The subtly orchestral “Sweet Life” has a cinematic quality. It’s a sunrise of a song that establishes the mood of the entire album: “I’ve held delicious taste on my tongue/Held precious kisses in my hand/It took so so long to understand/Life is sweet,” Bobo sings to open the album. This statement of purpose finds contentment in specific, telling images: a band of gold, a woman’s dark hair across the singer’s chest.

Musically, Sucker‘s rootsy diversity is daring but understated enough to not feel like overreaching: There’s swooning early rock/soul (“Hamster in a Cage”), locomotive country-rock (“Crazy Loneliness”), carnivalesque pop (“Perfect Day”), nimble garage rock (“Bad Boyfriends”), folk-rock reverie (“Errand Girl”), and even a blend of Paris café music and Beatlesque pop (“Mlle. Chatte”). But it all still sounds of a piece.

Bobo says he had three musical goals for Sucker: “I wanted speed. I wanted short songs. And I wanted melody.”

He succeeded in making what he acknowledges is a “snappier” record.

“Maybe I’ve written too many songs in bed,” Bobo muses. “I don’t understand it. But I had to be really conscious to make things move. Maybe there’s just a part of my personality that’s slow.”

What unites the music is a playful but settled mood of contentment. Against a bed of sha-la-la-la-la background vocals and saloon piano on “Perfect Day,” Bobo acknowledges that “it’s so nice not to be alone,” while promising his new love that “you and I can get to be phantoms from our deepest dreams.” Even on “Crazy Loneliness,” which opens with the sound of a rotary phone dialing, Bobo operates on the certainty that the titular feeling can be abated by contact with the “dear” to whom the song is addressed. Peace is only a phone call away.

Sucker is Bobo’s shortest album yet, clocking in at 12 songs in less than 30 minutes. This makes the penultimate “Drank” feel even longer than its 5:32 running time (the only song on the album that tops three minutes). It’s a drinking song but not of the tear-in-your-beer variety. It’s an unabashedly personal, but still impressionistic portrait of a meet-cute that evolves into more. Delivered in hushed vocals that build to a clattering instrumental conclusion, it seems to recount Bobo’s first meeting with the song’s subject: “Carried me back to the party/Filled our pockets with bottles of gin/Asked you to show me the ocean/You said, ‘I hope you can swim.'”

“That was literally written that morning, with my feet propped up on somebody’s head, thinking, What were we doing?” Bobo remembers. “That was in Perpignon, in a little flat on the beach.”

The song, which references a “slippery past” and an “uncertain future,” is all about diving in, capping Bobo’s three-album journey on a hard-earned happy note.

Food & Wine Food & Drink

Mud Bugs

Post author By Hannah Sayle
Post date April 8, 2010

The 15th Annual Overton Square Crawfish Festival is on Saturday, April 10th, and this time around, organizers are closing off Madison from Cooper to just past Florence.

“Since [the festival] has been growing, we wanted to give it more space,” says Ron Bobal, director of the festival.

Bayou Bar & Grill will provide the critters and stir up some Cajun favorites like gumbo and red beans and rice. There also will be an arts-and-crafts market, live music, and a variety of beers from D. Canale.

Proceeds from food, beer, and crafts sales will benefit the Alzheimer’s Association, but the music and the ambience are free. Star & Micey will kick off the set, followed by Bulletproof Vests, Jack O & the Tennessee Tearjerkers, and Snowglobe.

Overton Square Crawfish Festival, Saturday, April 10th, noon-6 p.m. For more information, call Ron Bobal at 281-6468.

On Friday, April 16th, and Saturday, April 17th, head down to the 5th Annual Creole Crawfish Festival at the Southaven Arena for a full-fledged Creole experience, including a gumbo cook-off and a zydeco dance contest.

Crawfish from Eunice, Louisiana, will be brought in fresh each day, and vendors will be filling plates with jambalaya, red beans and rice, and blackened fish. Traditional fair food and barbecue vendors will be there as well, but as Debbie Jenkins, director of the festival, says, “Our mission is to promote art, music, and culture across state lines, so the theme of the festival this year is ‘Mississippi Meets Louisiana.'”

The festival starts at 9 a.m. and ends at 11 p.m. both days. On Saturday morning, be sure to catch the Cajun puppet show starring Madame Poulet and Monsieur Roach in a tragic tale of ill-fated romance, and then stick around for Elvis impersonator “King Creole.”

Tickets are $10, but children under 12 get in free. The festival benefits “No Music Left Behind,” a program that refurbishes used musical instruments for local schools, and they welcome you to contribute any instruments you may have as well.

Creole Crawfish Festival, Friday-Saturday, April 16th-17th, 9 a.m.-11 p.m. For more information, visit creolecrawfishfestival.com or contact Debbie Jenkins at 619-5865.

On Sunday, April 18th, in downtown Memphis, Porter-Leath will hold its 18th annual City Auto Rajun Cajun Crawfish Festival. They’ll have music, a gumbo cooking contest, and more than 16,000 pounds of Louisiana crawfish. And of course, they’ll have their famous “Zany Cajun” contests, including crawfish races, a crawfish toss, a crawfish eating contest, and a crawfish bob. Bobbing for crawfish?

“We usually wait until people get pretty intoxicated,” says Mike Warr of Porter-Leath. “Then we put a pan of live crawfish in front of them, and they have to move the crawfish with their mouths from one pan to the next.” (Insider tip: If you’ve got a beard, you’ve got an advantage. “The crawfish tend to grab onto them and ride over,” according to Warr.)

Leading up to the festival, they’ll be giving away around 600 pounds of crawfish, so register on cityauto.com to get your share of the freebies. Of course, you can always just grab a bucket while you’re there. One three-pound bucket goes for about $15.

Vendors will include Bayou Bar & Grill, Cajun Catfish, Pearl’s Oyster House, and fair-food stalls. The event will be held at Wagner Place between Beale and Union, and admission is free.

Rajun Cajun Crawfish Festival, Sunday, April 18th, noon-6 p.m., Wagner Place. For more information, visit porter-leath.org or call Mike Warr at 577-2500.

Can’t make it to the festivals? Every week, Off the Dock offers live crawfish from Cottonport, Louisiana. The crawfish range from $2 to $2.50 per pound and come in 35- to 40-pound bags. Order your bag by Friday afternoon to pick them up fresh on Tuesday or by Wednesday afternoon to pick them up on Friday or Saturday.

Off the Dock Fresh Seafood, 3511 Sky Harbor Cove (546-7997)

Film Features Film/TV

Video Gold

Post author By Chris Herrington
Post date April 8, 2010

Remember those McDonald’s commercials about bright, energetic young people starting their careers with an entry-level fast-food job? Well, Nick Prueher — co-founder, with childhood friend Joe Pickett, of the Found Footage Festival — can relate. Sort of.

For the past five years, Prueher and Pickett have traveled the country presenting clips culled from a nation’s worth of VHS refuse, a reservoir of abandoned video from which the duo have discovered copious amounts of unintentional comedy: home movies, exercise videos, local-TV advertisements, training and instructional videos, long-forgotten cartoons, “celebrity bullshit,” and so much else. And the roots of the festival lie partly under the golden arches.

“In 1990 or 1991, I was working at McDonald’s and I found a training video that looked stupid enough to watch,” Prueher remembers. “It tried to have a story, a plotline. It was one of the most insulting things I could imagine. My first thought was, Joe has to see this video. That was sort of the beginning of the Found Footage Festival.”

Inspired by the fun of goofing on the McDonald’s training video, Prueher and Pickett began to scour thrift stores and garage sales for more potential comedy. Initially, it was just something to do with friends, but five or six years ago the duo — who have worked for such comedy outlets as The Onion and The Late Show with David Letterman — decided to take their hobby out of their living rooms and put it into movie theaters.

Essentially, Prueher and Pickett, both 34, do for their generation’s video oddities what cult TV series Mystery Science Theater did for an earlier generation’s cheap genre cinema: celebrate through loving mockery.

Since taking the Found Footage Festival on the road, Prueher and Pickett have developed a self-renewing process, hunting for videos at each tour stop and then taking a break between tours to mine their new acquisitions for material for the next Found Footage program.

“We’ll be in Memphis the day before, and we’ll go to thrift stores all day, collecting VHS tapes that look like they might have something worthwhile on them, and by worthwhile we mean bad in the right way,” Prueher says.

Prueher and Pickett are also happy to take tapes from fans at their tour stops, but in an age of YouTube, they do not get any material from the web.

“Taking things from the Internet feels like cheating,” Prueher says. “The reason we love the videos is that they all have a personal connection. It’s stuff we’ve found or stuff friends have found. Without context, the videos don’t really mean anything.”

The program the pair will present at their first Memphis stop is likely to include such examples as exercise videos from Milton Berle and Dolph Lundgren, Saturday morning cartoon clips starring Chuck Norris and MC Hammer, a cat-care instructional video from Golden Girl Rue McClanahan, comically inept regional television commercials, and some cringe-worthy sex-toy how-to videos.

Asked about Found Footage staples, Prueher says, “We always put together an exercise-video montage, because far and away, that’s the most common video we find at thrift stores. Anything that involves celebrities rapping. That’s always solid gold for us. And training videos.”

Prueher says the duo will add some Memphis-specific content for its local appearance in the form of a promotional video for ’80s-era wrestling tag team the Fabulous Ones. “It has to be one of the most unintentionally homoerotic videos you’ll ever see,” Prueher says.

Though the duo sometimes takes material from discarded DVDs, they stick mostly to VHS, which establishes a roughly late-’70s-to-mid-’90s time frame for most content.

“It was a time when you had people with a lot of ambition and access to video equipment who just weren’t that talented,” Prueher says. “Anybody with a bad idea could commit it to videotape. Luckily for us, those tapes are still circulating somewhere.”

Film Features Film/TV

More an idea than a movie.

Post author By Chris Herrington
Post date April 8, 2010

Truth be told, the ’70s teen-girl rock group the Runaways were a lot better story than they were a band. Perhaps appropriately, the new biopic on the band is a nice idea too shoddily executed.

Assembled by promoter/huckster Kim Fowley, the Runaways introduced rocker Joan Jett, who would go on to bigger and much better things, and glam singer Cherie Currie, who would not. Flanked, in part, by lead guitarist and future hair-metal hitmaker Lita Ford, the short-lived, controversial band’s output yielded one well-conceived if under-executed semi-classic single (“Cherry Bomb”), a few justly forgotten albums, and the sardonic and triumphal appellation “big in Japan.”

None of this suggests there isn’t a good movie to be made about the group. The Runaways does a nice job in the casting department: Former child-star Dakota Fanning is persuasive and all but unrecognizable as Currie, a middle-class girl who would rather emulate David Bowie than join her sister working behind the counter at the local Pup-n-Fries. Kristen Stewart is not as tough as the Jett that would later emerge, but her awkwardness and uncertainty as a rocker-in-training is endearing and presumably accurate given that Jett is an executive producer here. The rest of the bandmates (especially Stella Maeve as sunny drummer Sandy West) are engaging if underused. And as Fowley, Michael Shannon gives a typically committed performance that allows us to see how ambitious teens could be swayed by Fowley but without the cracks in his facade.

The execution, however, by music-video-schooled director Floria Sigismondi, lacks verve. There are moments here, such as Jett learning to handle rowdy crowds by batting tossed beer cans back at them with the neck of her guitar, mid-riff. But these moments are too few. The Runaways is not wrong about the band’s importance as probably the first significant all-girl rock band, setting the stage from which innumerable bands (Kleenex, Bikini Kill, L7, Sleater-Kinney, etc.) would make more lasting music. But the film is a little ham-handed following this trail, blasting an MC5 cover of “It’s a Man’s World” while following Jett home from guitar practice, for instance.

And The Runaways seems intent on making a case for the band that just isn’t there, going so far as to plaster the screen with hard-sell magazine and newspaper headlines (“More Than Horny Hype”). But the film undercuts itself when the final four songs heard or referenced, including over the closing credits, are not Runaways recordings but instead Jett solo.