The Kid review

The Kid (15, 111 mins)
Director: Nick Moran
★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

True life misery-lit is brought to the screen in this account of young Kevin, who spends his teen years being routinely beaten by his hideous mother (Natascha McElhone) and placed in a series of foster homes. As an adult, played by Rupert Friend, Kevin enters a world of crime and bare knuckle fighting, but yearns to make something of himself. While reasonably compelling in a car crash sort of way, it’s just one thing after another, a wallow in misery with little balance. But there are some better times for Kevin, with encounters with the likes of Bernard Hill’s social worker and Ioan Gruffudd’s teacher offering him some hope, though he never seems able to get a break just when things are looking up. Friend is good value, twitchy and nervous but he’s let down by a truly horrible turn from McElhone, who thinks that impersonating Janet Street Porter is a performance.

The Runaways review

The Runaways (15, 106 mins)
Director: Floria Sigismondi

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

 1970s all-girl rock band The Runaways are the subject of this by the numbers biopic that focuses mainly on Cherie (Dakota Fanning) and Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart), put together by Michael Shannon’s producer. In its early stages it’s a fairly straightforward look at a band getting together, practising, and establishing the clashing personalities, with the second half turning into the standard descent into pills and booze, and while there’s lots of moderately interesting details, there’s not much in the way of a compelling bigger picture. Shannon has loads of fun as their off the hook manager, but Stewart is her usual underpowered self and Fanning outclasses her at every turn. But aside from the checklist nature of the story, the biggest problem is that these 21st century actresses can’t really convince as 1970s gals.

Gainsbourg review

Gainsbourg (15, 135 mins)
Director: Joann Sfar

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

This choppy biopic of musician Serge Gainsbourg begins with his childhood in France during the war, where a focus on his Judaism comes to nothing, one of a number of irrelevancies that haunts it. As usual with biographical dramas, it offers a lot of sketched incidents with no clean through-line and no particular investment in the drama. All of a sudden it’s the 60s and he’s a pianist and a painter, and later still he’s a famous songwriter and womaniser, as we see how his affair with Bardot inspires his most famous song, Je t’aime. Though it does provide one visually interesting addition in the form of a life sized puppet of Gainsbourg that often appears to him, it’s a film of cigarette smoke and whisky that becomes more and more tiresome the more it focuses on the clichés of rock and roll self-destruction.