Bad Reputation screens September 26, at several Seattle area theaters; Jett plays in Seattle with Cheap Trick on Sept. 19.
The perfectly titled Joan Jett documentary, Bad Reputation, opens with a story the former Joan Larkin tells about her desire as a 13-year-old for a Sears electric guitar. (Adding to the vibe, she tells it in the grittiest, most punk-rock voice imaginable.)
Her parents didn’t understand why she would want such a thing, but they got her one. She wailed away on it until she became as good as—if not better than—the teen boys also dreaming of rock-and-roll stardom in the SoCal suburbs of the 1970s. In Floria Sigismondi’s 2010 feature film The Runaways, Jett (nicely played by Kristen Stewart) pays for a guitar with handfuls of coins, but this story is more telling.