Joan Jett was a trailblazer for women and outsiders in rock n roll and Bad Reputation does a decent job condensing this into a 90 minute raw and intense dive into the highest highs and lowest lows of Joan Jett's illustrious career. While the storytelling is a bit disjointed, it is absolutely a worthwhile watch. I would recommend to any music aficionado.

It's a documentary about female rock pioneer Joan Jett. It follows her from her teen years in L.A. and forming The Runaways with Cherie Currie, Lita Ford, and producer Kim Fowley. After the band's collapse, she falls into despair until she connects with bubble-gum music writer/producer Kenny Laguna. She starts up Joan Jett & The Blackhearts and forced to start a label of their own.

In general, I know about The Runaways and The Blackhearts but I don't know about Laguna. It's a solid biopic of the highs and the lows of her career. It goes through the generalities of The Runaways. Her drug use could be expanded on. I would have liked to know where she was when she heard about the deaths of her friends Sid and Nancy. Does she have any words of wisdom about them? As for the rest, her relationship with Laguna is the most interesting. It doesn't skip over their lulls in the 90's. There are also famous fans doing their thing. The two main non-connected ones are Billie Joe Armstrong and Miley Cyrus. While I appreciated Armstrong, I can do without Cyrus. No matter how hard she tries, Cyrus can never be punk. If it's young female Hollywood, they could have used more Kristen Stewart. At least, she has more professional connection to Joan Jett. One gets a good sense of her in this doc and that's always the main goal.

I was expecting this to be rather in-depth look at Joan Jett as opposed to more of a reaction to her from other people. It tends to be a quite redundant documentary, with Joan's peers and fans (often other big name musicians such as Billie Joe Armstrong, Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry, etc.) talking about how she was groundbreaking just for being a female rocker basically. So here's the thing, I'm sure there were actual sexist people who really didn't like what she was doing, my issue with this tends to be I think this tends to be a bit exagerrated at times. For example, they go on about how she talked about sex in her music and how this was taboo or socially unacceptable just because of her gender, by comparing it to Mick Jagger being sexually suggestive. I'm sorry, but yes there was blowback to male musicians being overtly sexual, especially in the south, hell parent groups (often headed by mothers) largely tried banning Male centric hard rock and metal music for being graphic, violent and (you guessed it) sexually suggestive. Seriously look up the PMRC. I get the feeling that a lot of the disgust and criticism directed towards Joan comes with the territory as opposed to it be a gender bias. Guys with long hair were often picked on or subjected to homophobic slurs sometimes.

Its more often a diatribe about this kind of stuff for large portions of the documentary as opposed to her musical process or anything much to do with her personal relationship with any of her bandmates. It even glosses this over with the Runaways. It doesn't particularly give much more insight into who she is than what we already know about her.