Almost Famous (2001) was a primary comfort movie of mine when I was an early teen. I knew it beat for beat. My obsession with music was my lifeline during this confusing time and seeing Almost Famous, I instantly latched onto its soft focus, rose-tinted depiction of rock n’ roll fandom, teenage-hood, and romance. I also got off on its knowing references to the minutiae of seventies rock history and celebrity. I was a naive fourteen-year-old starting high school at the time (2014), and fatally, I was nurturing a massive crush on a "mysterious" blonde classmate, who in demeanor and even looks resembled Kate Hudson's Penny Lane. In 2021, which was personally the darkest and most vulnerable year of my nascent adult life, I revisited the film, hoping to rediscover the comfort it once provided for me. I instead found myself rebuffed and disappointed. Penny Lane, who I had fallen in love with as a teenager, now seemed the most puffed up and insubstantial character in the whole film. That type of character just no longer interested me. I’m talking about the not-quite-manic-pixie-dream-girl: the mythic female lead that comes into a (male) protagonist’s life at exactly the right time, takes an uncommon interest in him, and provides him with a romantic coming of age and a path towards self realization and salvation, all while remaining essentially a projection. It’s this kind of character that mars an otherwise strong comedy like Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Mila Kunis) or some other certain Apatow brand films. It’s this kind of character who is half-way deconstructed in a movie like Something about Mary but ultimately cut loose and left to float chimerically above the surface of the film. It’s this kind of character who is the ultimate legacy of the rom com (not the classic screwball romances) and the unfortunate daughter of banal story conventions that are taken wholesale, without a second thought. Penny is a cypher, flat and illusory; she emerges from the haze of a male daydream. In the film she never tells any of the rock n’ rollers her real name: “There is no Morocco. There’s never been a Morocco! There’s not even a Penny Lane.” If her inner life is meant to be opaque, then director/writer Cameron Crowe succeeds beyond his wildest dreams. Penny Lane, or the woman she supposedly masks, doesn’t exist.
Still, Crowe is clever enough in his characterization of her character to imply that from the outset she is subtly manipulating William (the doe-eyed protagonist and Crowe stand-in, played by Patrick Fugit)—thus leaving us in suspense as to her true motives. But they ultimately remain so hazy (is she leading him on so that he’ll write a good story about the band?) that her dubiousness mirrors the writer’s more so than anything else. Rather than explore the consequences or causes of her manipulative nature (if indeed it is that), Crowe chooses to paint her in the hallowed light of a rock n roll saint. His idolization of her (and by extension all of the characters in this gentle hearted film) is just as wrongheaded as my idolization of my high-school crush, as any high school boy’s fumbling attempts to raise their crushes on unsuspecting young women to the level of hagiography. The performances from the two leads feel bland and inert: they cannot fill out the glimmering haloes poised above their heads. Hudson’s charm comes off as strained rather than convincing; she can’t breathe life into such a paper-thin conception. Likewise, Billy Crudup remains too good-natured and meek to be believable as his tormented rock star character is supposed to be. Originally based on Greg Allman, Crudup’s character, Russell Hammond, captures none of Allman’s own inner pain, his demons. Crowe is at fault for this, as well as Crudup. The vision Crowe prevents is just too nice to allow any real rock and roll darkness in. All the other “band aid” (Paquin et all) characters--Groupies of the fictional band, Clearwater--are infinitely more believable than Penny. They all feel like real people, even though they only garner slivers of screen time. In addition, Lester Bangs, (played by the always luminous Philip Seymour Hoffman), the squabbling band members, William’s mother and sister (McDormand and Deschenel respectively), the obsessive Zeppelin fan, and even the Rolling Stone journalists and the band’s new hotshot manager (Jimmy Fallon): all are more compelling and believable than the lovely miss Penny Lane, who sucks the air out from the center of the film. The “love triangle” between Penny, Russell, and William is the pivotal vortex on which the story turns; the more original aspects of Crowe’s story (which he dips his toes teasingly into but never really tackles) get short shrift.
A scene of burgeoning sexuality—the band-aids decide to “deflower” William, with all the excitement as well as potential discomfort and confusion this event might imply—for instance, is turned into a conventional heterosexual love scene. From a wider shot of the young ladies prancing around William like some 70’s, hippy-fied iteration of woodland nymphs, Crowe cuts to a close-up of Penny looking at William and William looking back at her with longing, finally simply showing extreme back-and-forth close-ups of their eyes as non-diegetic schmaltz washes over the soundtrack. This is a missed opportunity revealing Crowe’s reticence to explore emotional grey areas by instead opting for the standard trajectories we have all grown used to in films, but rarely experience in life. Look, there is nothing inherently wrong with the time-tested boy meets girl conceit. View, for example, Licorice Pizza’s fresh and elegant handing of this very conceit with its introductory tracking shot of Alana and her subsequent flirtatious sparring match with Cooper Hoffman. Disappointingly, Almost Famous promises to offer up something more than the boy meets girl formula, but falls back on it nonetheless. All one has to do is read stories of what a band like Led Zeppelin did to their groupies on tour (no really, look it up) to realize that Crowe’s back peddling of the debauched realities of life on the road with rock stars is also a way for him to mask his own complicity in the antics, or even to explore them in a non-judgmental way. Like William, Crowe was fifteen when he started going on tour with bands like the Eagles and the Allman Brothers band, and by his own admission, there is “much he left out” in his retelling of these escapades in Almost Famous. The “deflowering” scene hints at these inconvenient truths—the sordid and demystifying realities that Crowe has chosen to omit. Instead we get a middling and tepid, albeit pleasant, fantasy. He turns what could have been a deeply personal story into something contrived.
The movie promises to deliver us a core message of uplift: “it’s all about the music man.” In reality it delivers a product that’s more interested in celebrity and sex appeal then it lets on. Infuriatingly, Crowe often comes close to revealing this contradiction in his funny, perfectly written, often insightful dialogue: “rock and roll will save the word… the chicks are great? I sound like a total dick!” only to backpedal completely with the movie’s plotting, it’s manipulative grand design. Crowe is scared of exploring the darker (read: human) side of his characters, incapable of being honest with them and himself, and ultimately, incapable of loving them. This is why the scene where Lester Bangs tells a wide-eyed William that as a rock journalist he must above all else be “honest and unmerciful” comes across as fundamentally dishonest. The paradox of Crowe’s film is that it is cloyingly earnest and somehow dishonest at the same time. Crowe promises revelations particularly through the character of Lester Bangs, and then fails to give them to us, instead producing more pedestrian “shill.” Bangs quips to William: “They’re trying to buy respectability for a form that is gloriously, righteously dumb.” Crowe’s conception of rock, unfortunately, does just that. Almost Famous is nothing if not respectable. Crowe even opens his movie with a seeming critique of commercialized Christmas (a possible metonym for the commercialization of rock?). But Eyes Wide Shut this ain’t. Instead, he evokes a hot California Christmas with lingering shots of palm trees, tacky decorations, and girls in shorts (interestingly there is a scene later in the movie where the bands bass player ogles some high school girls running on the side of the highway: “we can’t stop the bus every time you see some girls in shorts, man!”), all set to the strains of “Alvin and the Chipmunks.” It is all fancy window dressing, nothing more.
Although this fundamentally sentimental pic leaves a maudlin taste in the mouth, it has many strong individual elements. Crowe’s writing throughout is seamlessly smooth, even when it is manipulative or under-schecked. The plane sequence is excellent: smartly written and cleverly conceived, if a tad too neat. Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Frances McDormand both turn in pitch perfect performances full of humor and insight. A young Zooey Deschanel has very little screen time but instantly convinces as William’s cooler older sister, who is intent on escaping their loving but overweening mother at all costs. Fugit’s pluck, charm, and teddy bear demeanor winningly conveys his character’s saucer eyed innocence. When Lester Bangs tells him that when he goes on tour with the band they’ll “get you drunk, they’ll get you girls” Fugit can’t quite suppress a smile of sheepish excitement. This moment rings true. The film gets so many little gestures right: The scene where William breaks down and cries outside of Russell’s door the morning after the “deflowering” for instance. Poor William is in over his head, far from home, and with a looming deadline from Rolling Stone. No one in his position would be able to take things in stride. The family scenes are the most believable in the movie, and feel just idiosyncratic enough to register like real, lived experience. Tellingly, “real world” and “real people” are phrases Crowe uses multiple times in his script. The great failure of this movie is that his treatment of the privileged world of rock stars seems somehow above the average everyday flaws of the “real people.” To be in the charmed circle of rock and entertainment stars is to exist on a private jet insulated from the rest of the plebeian hordes down below. The privileges of this position ultimately go unquestioned, which is not a critique I would normally level at a film except that it feels like Crowe lording his backstage passes over us with a faux-modest, aw-shucks shrug. Or as he would put it, he’s just: “inviting the fans in.”
Stillwater is a “midlevel band struggling in the harsh face of stardom,” a band that seems to be more preoccupied with money, drugs, “chicks” and fame (as well as their own egos) than their own mediocre music. The movie ends up feeling aspirational of those same things, “almost famous” and wanting to be. If we’re meant to be critical, we aren’t, because of the film’s chaste good manners. Crowe forgives the band entirely and blesses them all with a ludicrous happy ending that suggests an absolutely unrealistic level of personal growth from these sullen egoists. This ending retrospectively taints all the good that has come before it.
Still, it is not surprising that Almost Famous stoops to the tired Hollywood tactic of slovenly tying up every lose end of story and character in a final two minute montage (cue music)—this convention has persisted long after the Hays code disappeared, and was better used (and subverted) in some of those early films. It sees up a surprising number of indie pictures as well. As all conflicts in Almost Famous are meaninglessly resolved, critics praise the film’s “tight” writing. What the cheesy finale of Almost Famous suggests rather is a desperate flailing at closure, an inability to sit with the richness of ambiguity. “So Russell, what is it you love about music?” “To start with, everything.” And so Almost Famous ends with a mawkish shrug. The film ultimately tells us nothing about the joys and agonies of being a musician, and even less about the corruption, glamour, hedonism and opportunism of the rock n’ roll Industry. I’ll file this along with Whiplash under movies “about” music that drive me up the wall. (Don’t expect any intimate musical scenes like the recording session sequence in Love and Mercy, that’s for sure). At one point, Crowe uses Russell as a mouthpiece to praise the little idiosyncrasies in a given song that in turn makes it great; this comes not out of his character’s love of music, which there is little evidence for. The scene with Lester Bangs at the radio station and most of all, the scene where William’s sister leaves him her records, are the only ones that really succeed at conveying the secret delight of great music. Great music makes one feel validated, particularly at such a tender young age. It’s exactly the way I felt as a young music nerd watching those scenes: seen and heard. Unfortunately, that feeling is incredibly marketable, and while corporate America’s takeover of rock music is old news, I think it’s worth restating here. Almost Famous slyly purports itself to be an “honest and unmerciful” look at the commercialization of Rock. Instead it offers up more spoon-fed nostalgia, not dissimilar in the industry’s shameless profiteering off of the “golden” 60’s. The revolution is televised, and Boomer heaven is shamelessly repackaged time and time again. It is telling that Woodstock is one of the highest grossing and most re-watched concert films of all time, whereas the astounding tapes of the Harlem Cultural Festival, happening concurrently, wound-up languishing in a basement until Questlove rescued them in 2020, 50 years after they were made. In Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe’s blasé, lily-white sensibility strikes again. The film feels whitewashed as well as washed out of nuance. Maybe this is because the Allman Brothers, the band Crowe really went on tour with, included a Black drummer—the great “Jaimoe”—but Almost Famous is wall-to-wall white people.
With Almost Famous, Crowe proves that nostalgia is an endlessly replenishable marketing tool, and so he takes a distinctly non-threatening, non-questioning view of the past—a past that happens in this case to be his own. When one compares this approach to something like, say, Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives, which was also based on the director’s adolescence, the difference becomes as stark as a ray of LA sunshine. Another old high school chestnut of mine, Ghost World, has a more complicated take on the idolization of the past. Ghost World succeeds because it is less about adolescence and high school per say and more about what it means to feel alienated within American culture, and what it means to grow up and live with compromise, as well as the inadequacy of nostalgia. Watching it again, its writing only seems wiser now that I have grown older, something that can be said for very few high school flicks. Ghost World has only grown more layered with time whereas the slicked up Almost Famous now seems full of hot air. Re-watching it brought all the old sympathetic feelings of comfort rushing back. I want to love it, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t still charmed by it. But I’ve lost enough innocence that the dishonest notes in this wide-eyed paean to innocence stick out unavoidably.
Finally, the imagery of the film itself is worth commenting on briefly. It shares American Beauty’s sin of over-reliance on prim flower symbology. The band-aids “deflower” William, and in another scene Penny dances dreamily while clutching a single red rose in an empty, trash strewn auditorium after a concert all set to the strains of Cat Steven’s “The Wind.” This is a high school boy’s idea of poetry, a corny portrayal of innocence fit for a VH1 TV movie. Other aspects of the film are witty and humorous, but the flower scene garners an unintentional chuckle. In addition, there’s something off about the Quaaludes stomach pumping sequence, set to Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour.” While Penny is having her stomach pumped after almost dying from an overdose, William gazes at her wide-eyed and with a lovelorn grin. Perhaps this is Crowe’s attempt at subversion? If so, it provides no insight, has no president in the film, and only reveals confused intentions, and a voyeuristic tendency toward idolization. It is a dead giveaway that Crowe and his cinematographer, the talented John Toll (The Thin Red Line) often use softening filters to mitigate the imagery and cover the film in what is the equivalent of a warm, gauzy blanket. Crowe’s backwards-looking picture reminds me of the haunting final line of Nikolai Gogol’s story “Nevsky Prospect,” which describes the sole purpose of the particular kind of light that the streetlamps exude on that deceitful avenue: “to show everything in a false light.”