“Almost Famous” is an 18 year olds dream come true - to travel the country with a kick-ass rock-and-roll band - with more drugs, booze, and sex than you can imagine - meeting a few incredible souls that will shape your future along the way. Now tell that same epic experience through the passionate wide eyes of a 15 year-old outcast looking for nothing more than a great story on a some band. Cameron Crowe wrote and directed this film to tell his story as a new critic to rock and roll. He gives a true and honest insight into the struggles all great rock critics must go through.
“Almost Famous” revolves around William Miller (Patrick Fugit) who gets a taste of the real world at a young age of 15 when he is offered to right a story for Rolling Stone magazine. His role is similar to that of Cameron Crowe and the story itself mirrors many true events Crowe experienced. Frances McDormand plays Williams over-protective mother Elaine, a school professor ironically struggling to teach her oldest daughter Anita (Zooey Deschanel) how to live a fulfilling life while maintaining some morals. In 1973 William enters high school a quiet outcast secretly writing for underground newspapers. He seeks out Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who at the time was a huge deal in the rock critic world. A fifteen year-old needs some explaining and incite, even comfort while experiencing a road tour and all its baggage. This is where Lester Bangs comes in. His professional knowledge and advice flows deep through the movie almost poetic at times. He reassures William after the tour, “The only true currency in this bankrupt world... is what you share with someone else when your’e uncool.”
Along the way William meets both Penny Lane (Kate Hudson), her not-so-groupie “Band-Aides” (they are clearly all about the music) and the band Stillwater. Its two front men, Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup) on guitar and Jeff Bebe (Jason Lee) on lead vocals. As quickly as William learns how manipulated people can be, he learns how easily manipulated a critics work can be. Making friends with the band, falling in love with the lead guitarists girl (not wife), getting laid, getting the cover story, seeing the shit you shouldn’t have seen, all contribute to the complications of a critics work.
In “Almost Famous” Crowe managed to portray the difficulties William faced in a way that left the audience feeling sympathetic. Not only for William and his broken heart but for the situation. The situation, that with a stretch, every critic goes through. The push and pull of what to say and what not to. The factors involved can be endless but they are what make a story. Lester Bangs told William at the beginning and the end of the film, “Be honest, and unmerciful”. Crowe obviously took a lot from those two words. He understood great writing isn’t always riding on a destined-to-crash airplane/confessional with the hottest rock band of the time, but sometimes it is. Sometimes great writing hurts it’s so true.
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