Starring Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning. Rated 14A.

First-time feature director Floria Sigismondi gets plenty right in The Runaways, her fantastically colour-saturated, retro-looking love letter to the world’s first female rock band.

Forget sanitizing things for the Twilight tweens who were all a-Twitter the second Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning signed on for the biopic; the music-video veteran (Marilyn Manson, Sigur Rós) shoots for something more provocative. Sigismondi, who also wrote the screenplay, delivers a crazier-than-fiction rush of underage sex, drugs, and hormone-ravaged rock ’n’ roll. In doing so, she not only captures everything that made the all-teen quintet almost famous in the mid ’70s but, more importantly, makes an ironclad case that the band mattered. Whereas critics dismissed the Runaways as a novelty back in the day, Sigismondi casts them as revolutionary, the first band to prove girls could fuck, play, and party in airplane washrooms just as hard as the boys.

The movie is powered by one good performance (Dakota Fanning as messed-up-on-multiple-fronts blond bombshell singer Cherie Currie) and two great ones. More than a jet-black shag haircut in leather pants, Stewart is eerily dead-on as Joan Jett, offering up a potent mixture of chain-smoking tough-girl swagger and fuck-the-world cockiness.

It says something, then, that she’s overshadowed by Michael Shannon’s scenery-chewing take on obviously insane record producer Kim Fowley. A cross between Frankenstein, Lux Interior, and Lurch from The Addams Family, Shannon is epic, a manipulative but endlessly entertaining Svengali who celebrates his own genius with lines like “Jail-fucking-bait. Jack-fucking-pot.”

The Runaways doesn’t achieve total greatness. Guitarist Lita Ford (Scout Taylor-Compton) is reduced to a footnote, her handful of lines mostly making the case that she’s a monumental bitch. And the story sputters out when it shifts from the band to Currie’s wreck of a home life. Still, The Runaways is front-loaded with enough cheap thrills to make it essential for anyone who cares about rock ’n’ roll. Give Sigismondi full marks for re-creating a period when, all of a sudden, locking up your daughters was pointless, mostly because that might as well have been them up on-stage.