Corinne Burns: You are so jealous of me. I'm everything you ever wanted to be.
Billy: A cunt?
Corinne Burns: Exactly.

Not a very even film (and featuring way too many close-up shots of underaged girls' underpant-clad crotches to be comfortable), but a film to love nonetheless. While I think Times Square has more soul and captures confused teenagedom better, Diane Lane is iconic in this film.

The Fabulous Stains' lack of soul probably comes from its anger and divided message.

Now, it's nothing new that the Stains are formed to escape their small town, out of anger at their surroundings. Diane Lane as Corinne Burns has some fantastic lines about the disillusionment she feels as a teenage girl, but she's almost too angry to be creative. She's angry at her town, angry about not being taken seriously, angry about being made an accessory.

Corinne's transformation with her two-tone hair is a miraculous moment and deserves to be a cinematic icon - it establishes her sense of agency, originality, ownership. She refuses to take life lying down. It's a powerful moment, but sadly the only truly original moment the Stains offer as a band. Their songs are terrible, and I don't know if it's the feeling of anger, or badly-acted anger, that brings the film down - all I know is that the scene where the Skunkettes flip off the Looters on stage is a lot less powerful than the chant in Times Square to "go for it."

I think you can argue that it's a positive film for teenage girls, but there's a very cynical viewpoint, represented by the media presence in the film. IMDb's synopsis says it all: "the media and disaffected teens mistake the acerbic rants of an obnoxious teenage punk rocker as a rallying cry for the women of America, launching her and her talentless group to national stardom."

While the Stains don't possess much talent, I think this cynicism that's so heavily present in the film is its downfall. Although Billy (Ray Winstone being absolutely ridiculous and over the top) has a point about the Skunkettes being adverts for the band, it's overly cynical for the film's/the Stains' demographic, and ignores the fact that being part of a group like that, looking the part, is incredibly important when you're that age.

You can argue about who keeps your money after buying band-merchandise-hair dye, but that experience of dyeing your hair is a powerful moment as you become who you want to be for the first time. Considering there had been so very few films about girl rock groups, about teenage girls' sense of self, this negative viewpoint is just a big downer.

In a very small, 1-minute scene, Christine Lahti gives a very poignant insight into growing up as a small-town girl, saying her parents never figured she'd amount to much, and therefore she didn't think her daughter would either. It's the film's confusion about whether or not to take teenage girls seriously that brings it down.

PS: Paul Simonon should have gotten more screen time, he was so gorgeous back then.