Kim called me the next day to give me Joan's number. She took about three buses to get down here... took her like four hours to get from Canoga Park to Huntington Beach.

— Sandy West on her first meeting with Joan Jett, from We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk

TRYING SO HARD TO BE SO REAL, The Runaways opens with a splat of menstrual blood on a Los Angeles sidewalk. Cherie Currie, would-be pop chanteuse about to become a "queen of noise," has just begun her first period. But the blood looks fake, and that's just the first cheat. Nobody takes the bus in this movie, which is set in an L.A. that's a lot more Hollywood than it is punk-rock. (We might as well be watching Greenberg, another unpersuasive fable of a public-transit-less L.A.) It's revealing that first-time writer-director Floria Sigismondi places the band's early rehearsals in a trailer, rather than at drummer Sandy West's parents' suburban home. In her quest for trailer-trash exoticism, the director distills the group's history into a VH-1 cliché.

The Runaways were a bad idea, which is why The Runaways could have been a good movie. But rather than focus on what was distinctively amiss about the band — and its Sunset Strip Rasputin, Kim Fowley — Sigismondi hits the usual notes: too much too soon, intra-band rivalry and romance, and those demon drugs. While such themes could apply to just about any band, the Runaways were (a tiny bit) unique. They weren't the first all-female rock band (see Shaggs, Goldie and Gingerbreads, Fanny, et al.) or the first rock group to feature a female drummer (see Honeycombs, Velvet Underground) or lead guitarist (see Ramatam). But they were the first under-18 female rockers to score a record contract, and they arrived just as glam was yielding messily to punk — a transition that would not enhance their pre-fab career.

A town full of actors, Los Angeles naturally fell hard for David Bowie, with his Anthony Newley stylings and Jacques Brel affectations. Fowley himself made a Bowie-inspired album, International Heroes, in 1973. (It's not bad.) Largely based on Cherie Currie's memoir, Neon Angel, The Runaways has Currie (Dakota Fanning) mime "Lady Grinning Soul," one of Bowie's more cabaret-oriented tunes, at a high school talent show. Then she auditions for her future band with "Fever," a sultry Peggy Lee hit from a couple of years before Currie was born.

The blonde-shagged singer's black-haired foil is guitarist Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart), who lived in Rockville, Md. until she was 15, and preferred glitter-rock's tougher side — specifically, Detroit-bred, London-based leather girl Suzi Quatro. Jett wrote songs, so she won the battle of styles against Currie's pop tendencies. In the real-life story, however, Jett's emulation of Quatro — and the Stooges and the Sex Pistols, both of whom are featured on the soundtrack — was tempered by the quest for a mainstream hit led by Fowley (Michael Shannon), who made sure to own the band's publishing rights. But also by guitarist Lita Ford's preference for heavy metal.

Ford (Scout Taylor Compton) and West (Stella Maeve) don't get much attention in Runaways. But they're not written out entirely (like early collaborator Kari Krome), or reduced to an unnamed character like the bass player (Alia Shawkat), a composite of three bassists (including future Bangle Michael "Micki" Steele). Sigismondi assumes that the people who get the attention onstage were the most interesting off, which isn't always true. But then the filmmaker probably wasn't encouraged to find a provocative interpretation by Jett, who's one of the movie's executive producers — and also the ex-Runaway who's sustained the longest solo career. Who's gotta be more rock'n'roll? Jett, who went to number one with "I Love Rock'N'Roll''? Or post-Steele bassist Jackie Fox, who went to Harvard Law School?

Ironically, The Runaways is somewhat in the spirit of Fowley, one of those semi-inspired L.A. pop-biz fixers who was a performer, producer, and songwriter as well as a manager. He did things quick and dirty, and so does Sigismondi, a rock-vid veteran. The Runaways were kind of big in Japan, and the band's first tour there is simulated, amusingly, just with a jetliner bathroom, a highway tunnel, a dressing room, and a Japanese restaurant. The movie's harsh look, overexposed sunlight, and wobbly camera — designed to simulate jet-lag, downer intoxication, or simply being a teenager — are also smart low-budget moves. As for the slo-mo scene where Jett and Currie blow smoke at each other and then start to kiss — well, Fowley might have filmed it in 1976, if he thought he could have gotten away with it.

But Sigismondi makes Fowley the villain, because he used to rile up the Runaways by calling them stuff like "dogmeat" and "filthy pussies." This macho hostility was an act, at least to a certain extent, and most of the band members don't seem to have suffered long-term damage from the ritual abuse. (Years later, Ford would tell the compilers of We Got the Neutron Bomb that "Kim just took a little bit of understanding... He was weird, but pretty harmless.") The irony is that Jett survived in the business by finding herself a kinder, gentler svengali, Kenny Laguna, another L.A. pop-music lifer. Laguna, who's managed Jett since 1980, is also one of The Runaways' executive producers. That's how it goes in Hollywood: The story told by the credits is often more interesting than the one in the script.

THE RUNAWAYS — 2010, 100 min; at Landmark E Street and Bethesda Row, AMC Loews Shirlington, and Cinema Arts Theater.

THE SUMMER MOVIE SEASON IS BARELY A-BORNING, but it seems unlikely that Hollywood in 2010 can devise a more dishonest moment than the climactic sword battle — yes, climactic sword battle — in Tim Burton's excruciating Alice in Wonderland. The movie's Alice is a headstrong 19-year-old babe, not a bemused child, who ultimately must take the sword she is fated to raise — let's call it XX-calibur — and chop off the head of the fearsome Jabberwock. To convince herself that she can achieve this feat, Alice declares boldly that she "believes six impossible things before breakfast!"

Anyone familiar with Lewis Caroll's children's tales, even just from a lousy earlier movie adaptation, might suppose that believing six impossible things before breakfast is whimsy, with a hint of satire. But whimsy, when dumped into Hollywood's sausage-making machinery, becomes indistinguishable from macho bluster. The remarkable thing about Alice in Wonderland — which may explain why it made so much money so fast — is that it's utterly unremarkable. The movie is just a mush of predigested genres: head movie, kiddie 'toon, sci-fi flick, sword and sorcery adventure, 3D demo reel. It's everything and nothing.

Given this anonymity, the content of Alice's battle cry doesn't really matter. Lifting the sword, Alice might as well have announced, "when lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed," "she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat," or "drink plenty of fluids!" (She could have also shouted the empty tag line of Avril Lavigne's end-credits ditty: "You can't stop me now!")

There's nothing untoward, of course, about deconstructing a notable book (so long as it's out of copyright). But Alice isn't a comment on the original, or on Victorian society, changing notions of appropriate female behavior, or anything else. The movie doesn't have an idea in its head, which automatically disqualifies it from messing with most of the characters and some of the incidents in Carroll's story. Here's a sword-wielding motto Hollywood might embrace: Leave well enough alone.

Combining live action, animation, and motion-capture, Burton's Alice can't touch the imagination of Czech puppeteer Jan Svankmejer's 1988 stop-action version. But that's not the goal. Imagination is unpredictable and potentially disturbing, and big-budget studio pictures can't have that. Whether the marquee star is Tom Hanks, Gerard Butler, or Johnny Depp — who plays the Mad Hatter, as you may have heard — the procedure is the same: Take a preexisting story with name recognition and strip away anything that made it distinctive. You might say that Alice in Wonderland is an avatar of Carroll's book.

Like Avatar, Burton's overblown trifle is in 3D, a process that offers an exaggerated sense of depth in exchange for an annoying lack of crispness. Contemporary 3D is the visual equivalent of highly compressed MP3 sound: pumped-to-the-max, but lacking in detail. Both formats seem better designed for I-Phones than the big screen (or even the medium-sized screens of today's multiplexes). As soft to the eye as it is weak in the head, Alice in Wonderland is a day-glo trip with the flavor and texture of oatmeal.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND — 2010, 109 min; still lingering at various dogmeat multiplexes.

THIS YEAR'S LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has gotten a reasonably big U.S. rollout despite being afflicted with subtitles. The movie's array of crusaders and reprobates have the effrontery to speak Swedish, but otherwise the movie has so many Hollywood traits that a major-studio remake is already rumored. The story is pre-sold, since it's based on Stieg Larsson's internationally successful mystery-novel trilogy, and the serial-killer plot ciphers another by-the-numbers theological conspiracy, just as in Angels and Demons and Seven. (The latter's director, David Fincher, may helm a U.S. remake.) Plus, the movie has Nazis, God love 'em!

Just as crucial to the film's marketability is that the scary title character turns out be not quite so scary as she initially seems. A young, goth, bisexual, extensively pierced computer hacker, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) arrives wearing black lipstick, and is seen making out with a woman. But the lipstick then vanishes, and Lisbeth soon crawls into the bed of a decidedly middle-aged journalist, Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist). (Yeah, she gets on top.) Lisbeth was initially hired to investigate the reporter, who just lost a libel case to a slimy industrialist. Having hacked her way to a determination that Mikael is blameless, she decides to help him with his new project: solving the decades-old disappearance of the favorite niece of a different industrialist (an agreeable one).

The data dig leads to several of the nice plutocrat's nasty relatives, most of whom were Nazi collaborators or sympathizers back when that wasn't all that uncommon. It seems that the worst of them might also be a serial killer, brutalizing women in ritual murders modeled on verses from Leviticus, that perennial source of sanctimonious mischief. This development expands on a theme, since we've already learned that Lisbeth has been the victim of sexual violence — and that she fought back with a vehemence that might make mean old Yahweh think twice about his misogyny. She responds to a rapist with a form of rape of her own, which is pretty darn Old Testament of her. This proves Lisbeth is just the right "girl" to handle the serial killer, and also that she's on the same bloody wavelength as the heroes of such brutal Hollywood action-comedy flicks as Repo Men and the upcoming Kick-Ass.

Spurting blood is always attention getting, and yet The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a little dull. After years of this stuff, the outer limits of cruelty are beginning to look as if they're right next door. The movie never quite gets to the moment when Mikael draws five lines connecting the murder sites and reveals a... pentagram. But it might as well. By the time the revelations finally end, it no longer matters who kidnapped the cardinals, which ancient rabbinical injunction has been gorily illustrated, or if Jesus and Mary Magdalene's kids live in France. And there are still two more installments to go.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO — 2009, 152 min; at Landmark E Street and Bethesda Row, and AMC Loews Shirlington.