It wasn't the unfortunate name of actor Billy Crudup that kept me from watching this film when it initially came out; it was the name of writer/director Cameron Crowe. I associate 'Cameron' with James Cameron, director of Titanic. Strike one. I associate 'Crowe' with Russell Crowe, star of Gladiator. Stike two. And I associate Cameron Crowe himself with Jerry Maguire, one of only a handful of films that have moved me to walk out of the theater. Strike three.

But Mrs. Sloucho made a valiant effort in the week before the Academy Awards to see most of the films that had been nominated in the major categories. Every year, she deludes herself into thinking that she will actually be able to sit through the Oscars. And every year, she winds up flicking through other channels just to find something to watch in the commercials--never to return to the awards show. Depending on when it was that Crowe won the Oscar for best original screenplay, Mrs. Sloucho and I were either asleep or watching The Sopranos. But I was not disappointed to learn that he had received such an award.

Almost Famous is, in my opinion, a pretty remarkable piece of writing. It's a story that we all love to hear: a story of a charmed life. And yet it is told from the autobiographical perspective of Crowe himself without ever lapsing into the unadulterated self-indulgence that characterizes most such narratives. Although we always tend to tell stories to our advantage, the techniques that we rely on in order to portray ourselves as the heros on the great stage of life are usually so transparently self-serving that our listeners groan and change the subject.

Crowe's task in Almost Famous is to tell us the story of a fifteen-year-old boy who lucks into an assignment for Rolling Stone that results in his being paid for touring with a band called Stillwater. It's a charming story, a story based almost entirely on the trips Crowe made with various bands in his youth, but primarily on his experiences with Lynard Skynard. Crowe could easily bore us by dwelling too intensely on the character of the young journalist. He could just as easily irritate us by allowing the youngster to be eclipsed by the bandmembers and groupies. He could very easily have told his story in a self-aggrandizing way that would have made us envious rather than interested. And he could just as easily have told it in a self-aggrandizing way that would have made us embarrassed for him.

We see terrible rock stories all the time. In John Mellencamp's Falling from Grace, for instance, we are presented with a rock star protagonist who tries to convince himself and the people around him that he's just an ordinary guy. He fails miserably and earns the resentment of the people in the audience as well as his own family members. And in Purple Rain, we see Prince--a man whom I have been known to call the one true musical genius of our time--telling his own story with the kind of self-indulgence that makes us hate him for not being more of an ordinary guy.

Almost Famous strikes that difficult balance for which all autobiographers strive. In many ways, it is easier for Vergil to sing of "arms and the man" (i.e. about other people in historically remote times) than it is for Crowe to "sing himself and celebrate himself" (especially when we consider that Whitman himself misfires occasionally in that project).

If you had asked me before the movie whether a man could tell me the story of how he lost his virginity to three seductresses while on tour with a rock and roll band--if you had asked me how I would have reacted to such a story before the film, I would have said that my impulse would be either to call the man a liar or to punch him in the nose in jealousy or to merely sink into a fit of despondency and sullenness. I would not for a moment have considered that anyone could tell me such a story without making me want to challenge him (or his tale) in some way. Cameron Crowe manages to tell precisely that story without making us feel anything but the magic of possibility that there is in life and youth and--dare I say it?--rock and roll.

Everything about the story worked for me, down to the completely non-threatening fits of anxiety to which boy-journalist William Miller (Patrick Fugit) occasionally succumbs. His mother Elaine (Frances McDormand) has skipped him a couple of grades ahead in school precisely so that he can have two years after high school to explore the world without any pressure. All the inner turmoil that he has felt while being around other boys who were bigger, stronger (and significantly hairier) throughout high school is the price that he has paid in order to have this chance to party across America with Stillwater. Some viewers might expect him to be a little more distressed about the possibility of failing in his assignment. But the fact that he doesn't really start writing the article until the night before his deadline should demonstrate that he isn't really very concerned about capitalizing on the opportunity that Rolling Stone has given him.

He's only fifteen years old. For all he knows, opportunities like this come along all the time. And if he blows this one, he's got two more years to make up for a missed chance. So what if he isn't able to parlay this writing assignment into a career in music journalism? Touring the country with Stillwater is worlds more fun than third grade ever could have been.

Fugit is excellent as the young Miller. He shares a love interest, Penny Lane (Kate Hudson), with the lead guitarist for Stillwater, Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup). Crudup's performance is spot-on in terms of believability and vacuous passion. But even that performance is eclipsed by the really extraordinary portrayal of Creem editor Lester Bangs by Phillip Seymour Hoffman. (I found it interesting that Hoffman, who always reminds me of Jack Black, played a character so reminiscent of Black's Barry in High Fidelity.)

If I had more patience for wistful, nostalgiac portrayals of innocence scrutinized and rejected (if not exactly lost), then I would have given this one five stars. But even if it doesn't sink into the morass of self-indulgence that we associate with self-serving autobiographies, it is still a self-serving autobiography. It's a shame, really; but for some reason we're just not allowed to tell stories this charming about ourselves.



Recommended: Yes