"The Banger Sisters"

Susan Sarandon and Goldie Hawn have the time of their lives in this joyously randy tribute to two aging rock groupies.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Sep 20, 2002 | Groupies can't get a break. Men who have never actually partaken of their favors (some film critics, say) as well as, unfortunately, many who have (some rock stars) automatically brand them sluts. By and large, women are probably even more judgmental -- a woman's right to sleep with whomever she pleases is a fine feminist notion, but we shouldn't expect the level of discourse in women's restrooms to catch up with the academic journals anytime soon.

And yet I don't think the essential notion of rock 'n' roll groupiedom -- that a woman could be so turned on by a certain type of music that she's driven to sleep with the guys (or girls) who made it -- is so hard to fathom. Groupies also have their place not just in the history of rock, but in that of the sexual revolution of the late '60s and early '70s. In a 1987 Boston Phoenix review of Pamela Des Barres' memoir "I'm With the Band," one of the best books about rock subculture ever written, Joyce Millman wrote, "If rock stars used groupies, groupies used rock stars right back, wearing them like glittering accessories. These were the A- and B-sides of the '70s rock-and-sex daydream: The boys were bragging about doing it all the time, the girls were bragging about being done to."

"The Banger Sisters" is a highly entertaining and refreshingly nonjudgmental movie about that rock-and-sex daydream 20 to 30 years after the fact. In some ways -- perhaps too many ways -- it's deeply conventional. You can easily tick off all the times it goes off the rails into Hollywood dreck territory: There's a rousingly inspirational high-school graduation speech, and an instance of one character bolstering another's confidence by reassuring her that she's "a force."

But as with so many Hollywood pictures, there's a subtler, better movie lurking within the crowd-pleaser, and in the case of the "The Banger Sisters," it's not so hard to tease it out. Goldie Hawn is Suzette, a 50-ish rock 'n' roll fun girl who, even though she still looks pretty damn good, suddenly realizes she has to reckon with the fact that times have changed.

She also needs money. Although it's not spelled out, you just know Suzette is perennially irresponsible; when we first meet her, she's in the process of losing her job as a bartender at the Whiskey in L.A. After unsuccessfully trying to convince her boss that she's part of the place's history ("Jim Morrison passed out in there one night, with me underneath!" she says proudly, waving toward the bathroom), she slips a leather jacket over her tattooed, finely chiseled biceps, and goes home dejectedly to her apartment, a dusky tapestry- and candle-laden room in which the bed (as in all '60s and '70s rock pads) is the central feature.

Suddenly, she gets the bright idea to seek out her old friend Lavinia (Susan Sarandon), formerly known as Vinnie, her pal in all sorts of rock-related escapades back in the old days: It was Frank Zappa, Suzette explains, who gave the two women the nickname "The Banger Sisters." Suzette hasn't seen Vinnie in 20 years, but she has no compunction about asking her for a loan. So she leaves L.A. and heads for Phoenix, picking up a nebbishy screenwriter named Harry (Geoffrey Rush, in a breezy, understated, hilarious performance) along the way. There she barges in on the comfortable and exceedingly conventional life that Lavinia has built for herself, with her aspiring-politician lawyer husband (Robin Thomas) and two bratty teenage daughters (Erika Christensen and Sarandon's real-life daughter, Eva Amurri).

Lavinia, who has hidden her old life from her family, is none too pleased to see her old friend, and the rest of the movie deals with the way they each have to reckon with their past in relation to the present. Lavinia has willingly become one of those sacrificial-lamb suburban mothers, whose children take her for granted and whose husband, while he loves her, can barely see her for who she is. Impeccably coiffed and outfitted in shapelessly expensive beige coordinates, Lavinia looks with distaste at Suzette in her hothouse Spandex, and you can see why her air of judgment rankles and hurts Suzette.

Director Bob Dolman (who also wrote the screenplay) makes a smart move in allowing plenty of time for the prickly relations between the two to contract and expand: Their unease with each other, and their distrust, don't disappear magically, and you can see both sides. Suzette doesn't understand what a pain in the ass she can be, insinuating herself like a self-centered whirlwind into people's lives. And Lavinia, too anxious to preserve her carefully cultivated exterior, betrays her feelings about her old friend simply in the way she looks at her: You just know she's thinking "floozy."

Next Page: Goldie's marvelous legs, and Jimmy Page's, er, Polaroids

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