JOAN JETT
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“One, two, three, four!” she cried out in hoary rock parlance as she hit the stage with the blistering “Spinster” at Metro last week. The last 20 years didn’t seem to matter. To Joan Jett, straightforwardly devoted to every 70s rock shtick in the book, all life is on the stage. Everything else is just waiting in the wings. She pogos; she flails her sweaty hair; she flings her guitar picks to the audience; she punctuates her songs with yows. It would all be embarrassing, a guilty pleasure, but for the fact that she absolutely rocks out live, a moving reminder that maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all.
Jett’s like all rock stars, major and minor–you can’t take your eyes off her–and that comes across on both stage and screen. In the 1987 film Light of Day, Jett and Michael J. Fox play siblings in a rust-belt bar band, slugging it out in dreary dives. Set in Cleveland, the film predictably ignores that city’s seething punk history, focusing instead on a generic blue-collar rock band. The script is a mess, and the slight, fair Fox is hopelessly miscast as Jett’s brother–when a fight erupts between them, there’s no question the wiry Jett could take him apart. But she makes you care about the pair’s dull music and doomed aspirations. Fox, a decent enough actor, was ultimately pretending in his role. Jett wasn’t.
