Almost Famous

Writer-director Cameron Crowe’s reputation has evolved into an odd hybrid of bankable studio hitmaker and semi-reluctant zeitgeist guru. Creating movies at a semi-Kubrick rate of once every five years or so, Crowe is often credited with being selective about the stories he tells, which more often than not tend to strike a chord with the sensibility of the times while refining the genres in which they’re told. Just as Fast Times At Ridgemont High was arguably the most insightful of the screwball ‘80s high school comedies, Say Anything was probably the most thoughtful of the cheesy ‘80s teen romances. Despite the high-brow critics still labeling him a pop filmmaker, Crowe has earned his way to cult-lite status by consistently making movies that struggle for their optimism.

With Almost Famous Crowe has turned inward and backwards, to autobiography and ‘70s period epic, and true to paradox both turn out to be big steps forward. Despite failing to reach the commercial success of Jerry Maguire, Crowe’s new film about the lure and perils of being a professional rock music lover is his most fully realized work, and to those who open themselves to its charms, his most rewarding.

Based loosely on Crowe’s own real-life experience writing a Rolling Stone article on Led Zeppelin at the age of fifteen, Almost Famous follows the teen William Miller (newcomer Patrick Fugit) as he tours with the fictional band Stillwater as a writer. Ever the wide-eyed innocent, William is warned by both his hippie-professor single mother (a soulful Frances Mcdormand) and Creem editor Lester Bangs (the always perfect Phillip Seymour Hoffman)–for whom William has written several articles–to resist the seduction of the rock and roll lifestyle. Their motives are different, of course, his mother fearing for William’s virginity and bloodstream and Lester fearing for William’s journalistic integrity, but both share a protective instinct for his innocence as it sets off into the least innocent place in America.

It’s no small thing that William’s point of view is carefully crafted for us before he hits the road. His introduction to the music that will eventually become his life comes through his sister, who leaves home on the stroke of eighteen to escape the mother and wills her records to William, telling him prophetically that they will set him free. So seamlessly are we adhered to his good-natured wonderment that when Lester affectionately tells him that “there’s nothing controversial about you,” it’s we who blush. More importantly, it’s we who stand forlornly outside an impassable backstage door and encounter Penny Lane (Kate Hudson), a self-described “Band-Aid,” an evolved species of groupie that’s “all about the music.”

Penny Lane operates as William’s love interest, muse, and universal counterpoint, simultaneously pulling him into the semi-toxic embrace of rock glamour while falling into a maternal love for his innocence. Plotwise, Penny Lane is playfully, passionately involved with Stillwater’s lead guitarist Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), an emerging rock giant whose following threatens the band’s unity and whose on-record comments must anchor the article William is writing. The dynamic, overlapping relationships between the three of them form the movie’s heart, while the expectedly precise, almost perfect period-rock soundtrack form its soul.

Crowe, who has always superseded genre labels with uncommon protagonists and refreshingly messy but neatly wrapped story arcs, has added a new dimension of emotional depth to his clean technical skills. The pacing and editing are subtly impactive, guiding our shifts in perspective through the main and secondary characters with efficiently framed moments. In a lesser movie this would be manipulative, but having earned our trust–reset our innocence, practically–early on, Almost Famous stakes out a place deep in us, perhaps mirroring William’s clean love of music with our own pre-cynical love of movies. It’s not a conscious draw, but the speculation of it fairly describes the power of this movie, and the attitude with which best to appreciate it.

Much praise has been given to the acting too, and deservedly so. As the sunken-chested William, Fugit has the face of a sponge, sopping in the golden glow of Hudson, who plays the line between remorse and exuberance gracefully, and nails a crucial scene (look for her single tear). Crudup’s role as Russell may be the first one worthy of his cool intelligence since the underrated Without Limits, and Hoffman riffs the perfect crusty sage, redeeming the pits of uncoolness with a single statement that resonates as the film’s bittersweet thesis. It was Crowe, of course, who wrote that line, and his restraint in using few such aphorisms in favor of lots of true talk further shows that his talent for showing us the best and worst of ourselves is aging quite nicely.