LosAngelesTimes
Almost Famous is not almost anything, it's all there. It's
the latest project from writer-director Cameron Crowe, who's used the
free ride he earned with Jerry Maguire's success to create
something to cherish and enjoy, an intimate yet universal film that
will delight you and involve your heart.
Almost alone among makers of personal movies, a genre frequently
characterized by moping and inordinate special pleading, Crowe has used
irresistible performances and fine writing to turn a dramatized version
of his own past as America's youngest 1970s rock journalist into an
intoxicating mixture of Hollywood and reality.
William Miller, Crowe's 15-year-old protagonist, is a young person
in a very old tradition, wanting to find out about himself and the real
world and hoping that the price of experience doesn't come too high.
Crowe has laid hands on what's essential in his own sentimental
education, has in effect made his life yours and your life his for the
time this story is on the screen.
Like Jim Brooks, who's been an influence on him, Crowe has a gift
for blending things that don't usually coexist. With innate fairness,
he's made Almost Famous as pointed as it is loving, able to cast
a sympathetic but always clear and unblinking eye on the foibles of
human nature and the humor implicit in them.
Crowe also joins a keen sense of the richness of ordinary experience
to an ability to catch humanity on the fly. His feeling for his
characters is so exact, his affinity for personal frailty so touching,
that, when matched with a cast in sync with his intentions, what
results is a naturalness that films often forget how to convey.
Above all, Almost Famous knows how to deal with sentimental
material--the joys and embarrassments, victories and disappointments of
growing up--without pushing too hard. By resisting the temptation to
jam emotions down our throats, it allows them the space to be
authentically moving.
Essential to this was Crowe's decision to cast the unknown but
enormously likable Patrick Fugit as William Miller.
Fugit is a kid we warm to at once, someone whose emotions are always
accessible. Fugit easily conveys the levelheadedness William will need
to survive in his heady environment as well as the all-encompassing
sense of yearning, the drive to be what you not yet are and fear you
may never be, that could well be the defining emotion of adolescence.
For William Miller is not coming of age somewhere in the Corn Belt;
it's all happening to him in the middle of a full-fledged 1970s rock
'n' roll tour. With Crowe as guide, Almost Famous captures the
rush, the buzz, the glamour of rock while giving meaning to the
period's heady ambience of hysteria, decadence and unlikely innocence
for those who remember it as well as for those who do not.
Though it's set in 1973, Almost Famous starts with a prelude
four years earlier that introduces the family dynamic that shaped
William (played as a young boy by Michael Angarano).
After his father's death, he's been raised in San Diego by his
eccentric, fiercely protective mother Elaine (a completely wonderful
Frances McDormand), a strong-minded college professor who thinks
"adolescence is a marketing tool" and bans rock 'n' roll as a direct
link to promiscuous sex and dangerous drugs.
This doesn't sit well with William's older sister Anita (a fine
Zooey Deschanel), who loves rock and hates living in "a house of lies."
One of those lies, it turns out, is William's age. Though he thinks
he's 13, like his classmates, it turns out he's only 11. "This," he
says woefully, "explains so much."
When Anita leaves home to become a stewardess, she whispers to
William, "Look under your bed, it'll set you free." Waiting for him is
Anita's clandestine stash of rock records, and as he carefully handles
the albums by Dylan, Hendrix, the Rolling Stones and the Who, you can
see what will become the defining passion of William's life start to
stir.
By 1973, though he's only 15, William is precociously hooked on
writing about rock and when his idol, Lester Bangs, one of rock
criticism's seminal wild men and the editor of Creem magazine, comes to
town, the kid journalist wangles a face-to-face meeting that changes
his life.
Superbly played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, more and more the most
gifted and inspired character actor working in film, what could have
been the cliched portrait of an older mentor who speaks the straight
truth blossoms into a marvelous personality. (The real-life hard-living
Bangs died in 1982 at age 33.)
Write about what you know, Bangs tells him. Make your reputation on
being honest and unmerciful and, most important, do not get close to
the rock stars. "These people," he says with a hint of foresight, "are
not your friends."
Bangs also gives William his first assignment, to cover a Black
Sabbath concert at the San Diego Sports Arena. There he is befriended
by the next generation of groupies, young women including Polexia (Anna
Paquin) and Sapphire (Fairuza Balk) who call themselves "band aids" and
are there because they truly love the music.
Leader of this particular pack is the self-invented Penny Lane,
whose combination of beauty, affability, savoir-faire and determined
fragility completely overwhelms William even after he realizes, in a
very amusing scene, that she is barely older than he is.
Penny is played by Kate Hudson (it's her face behind the sunglasses
in the film's poster), and her work is so delicate, authentic and
accomplished that this is probably the last film for which anyone will
feel the impulse to identify her as Goldie Hawn's daughter.
Penny Lane helps William get access to Stillwater, the concert's
opening act, and to the group's charismatic, sexually charged lead
guitar, Russell Hammond (a role Billy Crudup absolutely nails). Almost
before he can believe it, Rolling Stone is calling William (the
magazine's editor Jann Wenner has a tiny cameo as a cab passenger) to
offer an assignment.
So, much to his mother's increasing horror, this pipsqueak reporter
ends up hanging out with Stillwater (apparently an amalgam of the
Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd and other bands) on their
Almost Famous bus tour of America.
Protectively looked out for by the girls and benignly neglected by
the band's manager (Shine's Noah Taylor), William thinks his
toughest problem is going to be lining up quality interview time with
Hammond and tendentious lead singer Jeff Bebe (an effective Jason Lee),
but that proves not to be it.
Instead, all unawares, William has to face some major life issues:
being a responsible journalist in an irresponsible milieu, determining
who your friends are and who they're not and giving those who are on
your side what they deserve. Throw in being 15 years old and you've got
an exceptional dramatic scenario.
Crowe may have been over his head emotionally when he traveled with
rock bands before he was out of high school, but as a director he's got
the wisdom of an old soul. "I'll quote you warmly and honestly,"
William promises Stillwater when they ask about his journalistic style,
and the qualities he guarantees the band are identical to the ones
Crowe lavishes on his film. See it and it'll stay with you as your own
memories do: funny, poignant, bittersweet and irreplaceable.
By Kenneth Turan
The Los Angeles Times