Almost Famous

Memories are never quite as much fun for other people as they are for the one having them, and this is true even if that person is Cameron Crowe. Crowe, a gifted writer and director (he did both in “Jerry Maguire”) has elected to take his own rather fabled past as a youthful rock critic in the tumultuous seventies and turn it into a feature film. The result is the pleasingly realized and warmly affectionate “Almost Famous.” Crowe is too talented to make a truly boring film, even out of material that in the wrong hands might have seemed like a relative’s tortured vacation footage. In the end, though, even he can’t quite conceal the fact that the picture doesn’t have a lot of substance underneath its highly evocative recreation of that era. Call it “That Seventies Movie.” At once an ode to a vanished time and a coming-of-age story, “Almost Famous” focuses on William Miller, a precocious fifteen year old whose passion for rock music leads him to begin a career as a rock journalist. Attracting the attention first of Creem magazine and then Rolling Stone, William is assigned to write an article on the up-and-coming band Stillwater.

His travels with the band (based upon Crowe’s own experience writing about the Allman Brothers Band), make up the bulk of the movie. William, of course, is exposed to a side of life he never knew while growing up with his college professor mother, Elaine. Although liberal, Elaine banned rock music from the house, believing that it leads inevitably to drugs and promiscuous sex. Frances McDormand plays Elaine straight, as a smart, thoughtful woman who recognizes the need to let her children follow their hearts but suffers immeasurably while doing so. Perhaps the critical relationship in the film is that between William and rock journalist Lester Bangs. Bangs (who in real life mentored the young Crowe) is played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is staking his claim as one of the most interesting character actors working today. He takes the relatively small role of Bangs and makes it a focal point of the movie.

A sort of Yoda of rock criticism, he counsels William not to “make friends with the band,” and (rather presciently, perhaps) declares that the death of rock ’n’ roll is at hand, a sentiment which may well resonate in the era of ’N Sync and Celine Dion. (There is a funny scene when Stillwater’s new manager asks--rhetorically, he thinks--“do you suppose Mick Jagger is still going to be trying to be a rock star when he's fifty?”) Among other life-changing events, William meets girls on the road, the most important of whom is Penny Lane. Penny and her friends travel with Stillwater, but, as one of the girls helpfully explains to William, they are not groupies, they are “band-aids.” William falls for Penny (played by Kate Hudson, who, I am obliged to point out, is Goldie Hawn’s daughter), but she is in love with the charismatic Russell, lead guitarist for the band. The band itself is in turmoil, as the other members (particluarly lead singer Jeff, well played by Jason Lee) become increasingly jealous of Russell’s growing popularity. In a curious case of life imitating art, Billy Crudup, who plays Russell, and may be the best young actor nobody has ever heard of, almost steals the movie with his rock star-like charisma.

William must grapple with his obligation to write the truth about what he sees, when he knows that doing so will jeopardize his increasingly personal relationship with the band. As Lester points out, the band makes William--maybe for the first time--feel “cool.” “Almost Famous” does a fine job of recreating an era and capturing some of the innocence that attended it. In William, it has a good observer, a lens through which we can watch events unfold. Although newcomer Patrick Fugit gives a marvelously unaffected performance, the movie does almost too good a job of making him detached. We never really develop a sense of who William is, and though the movie tries to create a series of big epiphanies for William, too often it falls back on shots of him looking wide-eyed and startled at some shenanigans he witnesses. (I am also a little alarmed about the scene in which he plants a kiss on the recently overdosed Penny--is that supposed to be a sign of his growing maturity?) When the central character in the film is not the most compelling one, it can be problematic. In “Almost Famous,” I found myself more intrigued by Lester, Russell, and maybe even Penny than in William (after all, he is just the reporter, not the subject of the story).

I kept wanting William--and Crowe--to get to the heart of the matter, to shed some light on this time and this world, but in the end we are left simply with some rather hoary rock ’n’ roll anecdotes and a rather long two hours of nostalgia and (well selected) period music. The film never generates a truly compelling point of view. Had Crowe used his skill and his fine cast to really try to explain what rock music circa 1973 meant to America, he might have produced a deeper, more memorable film, instead of simply the good entertainment it unquestionably is. (9/20/2000)