I find it interesting that at this time last year Kristen Stewart was just starting to attract some attention for her performance in Sean Penn’s Into The Wild, after quietly building up her resume with appearances in such films as Undertow, Zathura and The Messengers (her first major role was playing Jodie Foster’s diabetic daughter in Panic Room). Today, however, she is on the verge of becoming a mega-star thanks to Twilight, and now she has just signed on to play Joan Jett in an upcoming biopic about her band The Runaways.

The movie is called, as you can probably guess, The Runaways, and will be directed by former fashion photographer and music video director Floria Sigismondi. They were one of the first all-girl bands to successfully break into the male-dominated world of rock and roll, and Stewart seems like a perfect choice to star considering that she is now basically an inspiration to teenage girls around the world. It will give the project some much-needed appeal to a younger demographic, instead of just the older crowd that grew up listening to Joan Jett back in the late ’70s and early ’80s. The Runaways is expected to shoot sometime in 2009, but will be forced to work around the production schedule for the Twilight sequel New Moon, which starts in March. In the meantime check out Floria Sigismondi’s short film Postmortem Bliss, embedded below.