ALMOST FAMOUS @ 25

William Miller already feels geeky enough when he's told that he was put into school two years in advance by his weird academic mother. His sister launches out of the family nest as soon as she can at which point she leaves her record collection to William. He devours this and his need to discuss music leads to him meeting the legendary Lester Bangs who is generous with advice and gives him an assignment. At the concert that night, he meets the non-groupie bevy of Band Aids and the band Stillwater and gets backstage. They are going on tour and invite him along. So, he goes back home and finishes his stamp collection. Like fuck, he does.

Cameron Crowe's mid-size autobiographical epic came after a number of projects, writing or directorial, that revealed a deep understanding of youth. It was also where he went after his mega-hit Jerry McGuire. Almost Famous feels like an arrived opportunity at which he throws all of his experience hanging around rockstars as a teenager and getting to work the film industry. As with some other projects I can think of, I would much rather this filtration through fiction than the most detailed tell-all book. Crowe's move to make this was the right time: it was way beyond any need to prove himself. It also gave him a dream cast of solid performers and new talent to play with. Add some licencing coups with the source music and you've got a package that presents as 1973 on a plate. Except, it doesn't feel nostalgic.

Why? Crowe does two things to prevent that. First, it feels authentic. The actors playing band members rehearsed as the band, overseen by Peter Frampton who had been a rock star from the period setting. If the stage sound is much more studio-articulate than it would have been, that's in service of the audience: we do need to see the point of the adulation, even if a real group would have sounded like sludge at the time. Second, Crowe, having been there to document it, knows his era. After the explosive rush of innovation and upscaling of rock music in the '60s, the dearly '70s was a time when the top few established their empires in the stadiums that Led Zeppelin called the houses of the holy. Before it was Woodstock and Altamont and to come was the ravaging tear down of punk. For this moment, the monster bands ruled and the culture shrank around them like the plastic wrap of the merch. Crowe is remembering first hand. The coming of age tale is gravy.

Is Frances McDormand too brittle with her early boomer anti-drugs messaging? Maybe, but that does get balanced by the genuinely on-point things she also says. McDormand was half a decade out from her Oscar-winning turn in Fargo and was taking her pick of the roles. By the time you get scenes where swaggering rock stars are instantly brought around when talking to her on the phone, we really don't need both sides of the conversation (the Billy Crudup moment in the trailer remains a favourite).

Phillip Seymour Hoffman chews it up as maverick contrarian Lester Bangs. While I know that he didn't get British punk (his big piece on The Sex Pistols is remarkably off) Bangs was reliably surprising and funny. Seymour Hoffman was in career mode but was still featuring in the kinds of roles that got him noticed in the first place he approaches the fiery writer as a character study that must have felt like a holiday after his eye popping turns in Boogie Nights and Happiness. His opposite numbers are Billy Crudup and Jason Lee as the leading duo in Stillwater whose artistic ambitions struggle with their egos in a solid display. They wouldn't last a round with Bangs but we don't get to see that.

Kate Hudson, Anna Paquin and Fairuza Balk are the Band Aids and throw a patchouli-scented veil over the self-fashioned mystique they adopt. The dialogue about age and the truth and the ones about life choices (Morocco) ring with the funny and saddening poignancy that crushable youth is wont to choose. Zooey Deschanel's bug eyed youth as Anita Miller is played against her character's whimsy as she races toward a more conventional path to independence. 

Finally, it is Patrick Fugit who must shoulder the movie. He does so with the film's key disarmer, wonder. While quick to put a comically unconvincing grown up demeanour, his frequent moments of joyous witness give the film its durable high. One wrong note in his performance and everything gets exposed as fancy dress. When he learns over time to approach the rock stars, stroking vanity and appealing to honesty or at least the concept of it, it feels like his coming of age through his immersion in the music is the story we are enjoying.

But nothing's perfect. What are we to make of the sequence where the Band-Aids initiate William? Their ages as characters are not astronomical but would we cheer along as much if the genders were reversed? The situation is between William as a cute mid-teens writer and a bevy of camp-followers. The numbers alone would make it a gang bang. If it were younger roadies with a young female writer ... I'll admit that I look around this moment. Such junctions abound in coming of age narratives and are usually euphoric if male and hard and "real" if female. In 2000, this had yet to be expressed otherwise. Then again, Crowe is fictionalising an experience from his own life and effectively has dibs on how it's told.

And otherwise, in the scenes where the Band-Aids are variously energising in a kind of symbiosis or getting their shelf life labels pointed out, the women are designated as essential to the process, whether as muse, or fan or both. That Penny Lane is saved from being a casualty and continues in strength and that Sapphire's short, pointed monologue backstage lands with Russell are indications of even handedness and that the only illusions are those best broken by a business that gives fantasy and takes innocence is a kind of moral to the tale. Is the ending happy? It is temporarily resolved.

I bring this up, even though it doesn't form the central core of the film but it is unignorable on subsequent viewings. I personally am resolved to note it and let it weigh against my unceasing enjoyment of this piece. Almost Famous is a rare example of a film that is actually enhanced by a longer cut. Crowe's re-edit Untitled or the bootleg cut just gives us more of what we want and doesn't lag for a second for any of its forty extra minutes. For authenticity, I watched the original cut for this review.

As a punk in the late '70s, I celebrated the destructive critique of the stadium dinosaurs. This was partly due to my enthusiasm for those dinosaurs a little earlier when I completed my collections of Zeppelin, Queen, Bowie, and many more. The shame of the admission was enough but the feeling was the same. I admired from a foggy distance, the tales of barbaric excess on U.S. tours and wished I could be there will all the names and faces. Punk felt more accessible but there was nothing but recognition on my face as I watched how intently and solidly Cameron Crowe guided Patrick Fugit through his own brush with mystique and power. This film exults rock music without embarrassment or irony because it doesn't need to. In the end it is joy, plain joy.

Viewing notes: I watched the original, shorter cut of this for the review here. The 4K presentation is extraordinary (though, what a great asset a Dolby Atmos audio track would have been!) As a modern classic, it's pretty easy to find for rent or free with subscription on Prime and Stan. It's also available on  Blu-Ray (with both cuts) and DVD (original cut). 

ALMOST FAMOUS @ 20

Young William Miller defies the expectations of his youth and the warnings of his mother to take his sister's advice and free himself through the power of rock music. It's 1973 and things like that happened, at least on concept albums. Assigned a piece on Black Sabbath by enfant terrible of rock journalism Lester Bangs he comes to a halt backstage when the mountainous doorman won't let him in. Luckily a sparkle of fairies appear and promise to get him admission as they flood in. Then, a band of journeymen appears and allow him, through his use of magic phrases, admitance under their protection. And, just like that William Miller at fifteen, passing as eighteen, becomes a rock journalist. Well, not quite, but whatever happens is going to change his life from the law career path his mother has been building for him like Lego to meetings with demi-gods and angels. 

Before I wrote that paragraph I hadn't made the connections between this movie's plot and the kind of Tolkeinesque narrative logic it uses. That might be why this film, which to a very susbstanial degree is a standard coming of age story playing dress up, transcends its own stated purpose and becomes something far richer than a plot synopsis could manage. It also comes from the experience of its writer/director Cameron Crowe who really did tour with high profile rock bands in the early seventies when he was well under age, which adds gravitas. So, while the forays into cuteness and cliches from the age of stadium rock make it into this piece the way they get into so many other films like this, it is never overwhelmed by them and there is always something in the writing, the filmmaking and the performances to redress the balance.

The film was produced and released with perfect timing, coming at the end of a revival of '70s pop culture and attempts by new rock stars to be indulged like the old ones were. Crowe's nostalgia is less on show here then his understanding of the longing in the decade's revivalism. When Almost Famous is set there was a similar revival of '50s pop, making it on the charts with Sha Na Na and into the cinemas with American Graffiti and into the lounge rooms with Happy Days. Twenty something years later, the flares and long hairs were back and rock festivals were on the scale of Old Testament conflicts. In a film about a fictional band that name checks real acts like Bowie or Led Zepellin (and gets a former member of Humble Pie to play Humble Pie's road manager) and includes characters from the journalism of the time like Lester Bangs and Jan Wenner, he is giving more than a few hints that his own experience of the rock glamour of the '70s cannot be reproduced in anything but cover versions.

Lest that should land me in a solemn mire I should point out that this is an extraordinarily entertaining movie whose life lessons go down like dessert and whose sheen of fable allows sight of enough grit to keep it flowing and charging. Patrick Fugit shines as William, variously blessed and cursed with intelligence beyond his years yet still a kid when circumstances demand he remember that. Frances McDormand's mother is perhaps the closest the film comes to a persistent stereotype but the veteran actor does lift the role into humanity with a kind of hard-arsed comic turn. Kate Hudson's gliterring Penny Lane also has wisdom but hers has been forged by pain and abuse. Billy Crudup is exactly the kind of charismatic and capricious miasma of someone who doesn't know he is still young and unschooled by his life choices (hello, rock stars). As his foil in the band Jason Lee plays his conscience beneath his would-be rock god persona, controlling the kind of smartarsed character he'd come to be known as from Kevin Smith movies. His performance is in the shadow of Crudup's, reflecting their characters but it is worth your attention. But the cast in this epic memoir-faux, whether one-line bits or starring roles keep the momentum rolling, testifying by deed to their director's skills with them.

I was a crucial few years younger than William in the '70s and didn't know I was just waiting for punk to happen to feel I had a place in the culture. Even though I had good sibling influences that opened doors to the best of early '70s rock music I never quite felt it was mine. When I went to see The Song Remains the Same I dug it but I was watching a band rather than a legend. Punk defined my view of rockstars as stadium gods and I preferred the notion of the musicians and the punters appearing to be the same thing. This why I felt none of the nostalgia that poured from the screen but eagerly followed the wonder and the joy of these people who at their own levels lived on the edge of fame and might well need to accept that as best. All the warmth this film can muster is tempered by that sobering notion.

So, I shouldn't like this film as much as I do. But I like it so much that I chose to watch the much longer cut Crowe produced a few years later for home video. Tellingly, he didn't give it the kiss of death and call it the Director's Cut (that had been released to cinemas) but the Bootleg Version. The title in the opening sequence is given as Untitled. Not just a fun joke on the culture of completist fandom but an admission that if you  liked the original you are going to like having a lot more of it here. Against the tide of negative examples in director's cuts (almost all of them are bloated and obscure the orginals' value) this one actually works better. There is no drag just to have a cute period reference in or the sense that something made it in because a self-styled cinematic genius needed to bare his soul more clearly. The flow of the longer cut is as fleet as the first version. There's just more. 

I had the bootleg version on DVD and even though I upgraded to the recent 4K release (which is utterly stunning) I will be keeping the old disc for the packaging alone. So, yeah, this one still works twenty years later just as it worked twenty years after Cameron Crowe lived it. And for all the hokey cameos, goofy humour and unquestioned rock cliches this remains a triumph of youth and the intensity of its fandom, and something that anyone who sees it will understand: joy.