Almost Famous

Dir.: Cameron Crowe

R, 122 min.

Now playing at local theaters

I bought my first copy of Rolling Stone magazine in the summer of 1984, at age 13, and I spent my teenage years scouring The Great Escape for back issues and checking Rolling Stone record guides and rock histories out of the local library. An influential English teacher loaned me his copy of Greil Marcus’ Mystery Train, and my sister-in-law gave me a copy of What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been, the magazine’s 20th-anniversary retrospective, for my birthday. By the time I turned 15, I had made my own record guide on loose leaf paper shuffled into a three-ring binder. I had always wanted to be a writer, and I had always liked rock ’n’ roll. Suddenly, thanks to the lively, scholarly spirit of several heroic critics, I saw a way to combine my two passions, and like a budding big-leaguer practicing his swing, I spent countless hours in my room honing my critical chops.

Cameron Crowe spent his teenage years on the road with the likes of Led Zeppelin and the Allman Brothers, covering their antics for Rolling Stone. Later he became a well-loved writer-director, delivering two bona fide classics of the American cinema, Say Anything... and Jerry Maguire. Now Crowe has combined his two passions by making a movie about his days as a Rolling Stone reporter in the early ’70s, when rock ’n’ roll was still a lifestyle and not merely a pastime.

Almost Famous stars Patrick Fugit as William Miller, the whip-smart son of a fussy college professor (played by Frances McDormand). When William’s bad-seed older sister Anita (Zooey Deschanel) leaves home, she leaves him her hidden cache of rock records, and William begins to seek solace and meaning in the grooves. A meeting with gonzo rock writer Lester Bangs (played by the rock-solid Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose five minutes of screen time anchors the movie) leads to an assignment covering a Black Sabbath concert for Creem, but the gig is complicated by William’s baby face, which keeps him from getting past security. Luckily, a few kind words aimed at the opening act—an up-and-coming Michigan hard-rock band called Stillwater—gains William access.

So the boy who’s unpopular at school and misunderstood at home spends an evening with folks who are playing for thousands of screaming fans. William meets the members of Stillwater, including the genial, neurotic lead singer Jeff Bebe (played by Jason Lee, hitting his one note with gusto) and the charismatic, tantalizingly reticent guitarist Russell Hammond (played by the marvelously mercurial Billy Crudup). He also meets the self-titled “band aids,” a gaggle of joyful groupies led by passionate free spirit Penny Lane (a starmaking performance by Kate Hudson), who sums up the electric feeling of the evening by breathlessly repeating, “It’s all happening.” For a few hours at least, William is welcomed into a community of exciting, fascinating people, and he doesn’t want the good feeling to end.

The rest of Almost Famous is about the attempts to extend that good feeling and the repercussions that ensue. Penny entices William to join her in following Stillwater across the country—an endeavor that’s subsidized by Rolling Stone, who contracts the youngster to do a feature on the band. William becomes a kind of mascot to the band aids, but for all the hours he spends quietly observing the members of Stillwater, he has a difficult time getting more than a few minutes alone with any one of them for an on-the-record interview.

Here Crowe captures that elusive feeling of being on the inside and the outside at the same time. Being a journalist and being a fan means struggling with your own ego when you meet one of your heroes, asking yourself, “Do they know who I am? Do they appreciate what I can do for them in print?” For William, who has the added impediment of being young—and therefore easily manipulated—the question of whether these people are really his friends or just using him as a publicity tool gives his amazing journey a tinge of uncertainty. But whenever he begins to doubt, Penny swoops in, waves her hands in his face, and convinces William that he’s right where he’s supposed to be.

As always in a Cameron Crowe film, all the characters are likable—even the thorny, unknowable Russell. And as always, Crowe isn’t afraid to put his characters through painful situations, just as he doesn’t shy away from an obvious visual gag or repetitive dialogue sting. He’s a dramatist and an entertainer who makes warm, vivid, engaging movies; he’s also one of the few mainstream filmmakers whose movies aren’t about just one thing. Almost Famous is sort of an autobiography, but it develops into a meditation on celebrity and what it does to an artist. The plot is also driven by a love triangle between William, Penny, and Russell (and just who loves whom is not always clear). The film is shot through with a painful kind of nostalgia—the memories of a glorious, fleeting time that was also a little awkward and embarrassing.

At the beginning of the film, Lester Bangs tells William that rock ’n’ roll is dying and that he’s in on the last days of the party; at the end of the film, as everything is winding up, Penny calls William “the last of my old-time friends,” even though they just met a month earlier. One of the recurring themes of Almost Famous has to do with characters “looking for something real” in momentary interactions, and looking for “the truth.” Authenticity has long been one of the main goals of rock ’n’ roll, and yet another of the stories in Almost Famous is how platinum-level success seems to require that a band become less authentic, hiding its true nature from journalists and would-be friends.

Crowe’s film is already getting praised to the skies, which is no surprise, given that most film critics have a story similar to William’s: getting enmeshed in the intersection of art, celebrity, and journalism from an early age. But in the spirit of William, I’ve got to report the truth, which is that although I wanted to like all of Almost Famous, I was troubled by much of the final 30 minutes. As the picture winds down, Crowe attempts another one of his Jerry Maguire-style fakeouts. In that previous film, the audience was caught up in the story of Maguire’s fledgling agency, and we were blindsided when we realized that the protagonist’s failing marriage was just as important to us. Toward the end of Almost Famous, Crowe leaves aside his precise recreation of the early ’70s rock tour and attempts to bring his romantic subplot to the front.

To accomplish what he wants to do, the director throws in a few not-especially-convincing plot complications and then resolves them a little too neatly. And to force the ending that he requires, Crowe—for the first time in the film, I believe—presents a few scenes that take place without William’s direct or indirect involvement. This movie is mostly about what William sees and how he perceives it, and to have other characters talking about him when he’s not around seems to violate the point of the movie—it spoils the mystery of whether he really is just passing through Stillwater’s world, as opposed to making a real impression.

Still, Almost Famous is filled with more memorable characters and deeply human situations than just about any American movie this year, and its evocation of the dwindling hopefulness of 1974 is nothing short of remarkable. Even though much about the ending rings false in a story context, in a larger context it’s absolutely appropriate. Throughout the film, fans beat on doors trying to get close to rock stars. At the end of Almost Famous, a rock star beats on the door of a fan and sits with him in a room covered in posters that weren’t paid for by record companies. That sort of image can appeal to everyone. As for me, I get my kicks from parts of the film that may not mean much to the casual viewer. Imagine—being able to pick up a phone and talk to Lester Bangs.

—Noel Murray

My Life to Live

Last fall, I spent a morning with a Hillsboro High student for a school project, and I asked her what movies she was looking forward to seeing. At the top of her list was a film I’d never heard of: a Canadian movie called Set Me Free. When I asked her why she wanted to see it, she said that she’d just seen Jean-Luc Godard’s 1962 film Vivre sa vie. Set Me Free, she said, was about a teenage girl who’d loved it as much as she had.

Hearing someone in high school describe her admiration for Godard fairly stunned me, although it shouldn’t have. From Gabe Klinger, a Chicago teen who runs an amazingly erudite film Web site, http://home.earthlink.net/~cklinger/regular.html, to Rochester, N.Y., brothers Philip and Paul Fileri, who regularly post engaging discussions of films and filmmakers online, a whole wave of high-school cinephiles is growing across the country, spurred by video, cable, and the Internet. What took me aback was hearing a teenager express her affinity for a movie as world-weary as Vivre sa vie—a film about an existential prostitute, Nana, played by the bewitching Anna Karina, who survives on dispassionate sex and eventually dies in a hail of bullets.

And yet Nana’s jaded cool is just what impresses Hanna, the 13-year-old heroine of Set Me Free, Léa Pool’s tough, lyrical, and piercingly empathetic study of growing up confined and confused in 1960s Quebec. Hanna, played in an extraordinary performance by newcomer Karine Vanasse, craves some kind of control over her life. Her body is changing, her grandmother’s country home is stifling. She flees to rejoin her unmarried parents and older brother in a Montreal tenement, but that’s just exchanging one form of confinement for another. Her frequently unemployed father (Miki Manojlovic), a Holocaust survivor, flies into unbidden rages; her overworked mother (Pascale Bussières) gets more fragile by the day. At school her unusual home life makes her an outcast. That makes the outlaw pragmatism of Vivre sa vie all the more appealing. After seeing the movie four times, Hanna hungrily adopts Nana’s declaration, “I am responsible.”

Being 13, though, Hanna doesn’t really understand what she’s responsible for. Pool nails the confusion of getting adult sensations before gaining the experience or maturity to make sense of them. Hanna’s teacher (Nancy Huston, who collaborated on the script) cautions her against identifying too strongly with Nana, mainly because the girl lacks the perspective to know which aspects of a movie called My Life to Live she should ignore. In the movie’s most unsettling sequence, Hanna wanders through Montreal’s red-light district, where an encounter with a pushy john punctures the fantasy offered by Nana (and by Godard). In life lessons, movies make bad instructors.

On the other hand, Nana’s poise gives Hanna a glimpse of hope beyond her awkward adolescence. There’s a wonderful scene of Hanna recreating Anna Karina’s wild pool-hall freakout in the Godard film, and as the girl pictures herself as the reckless Parisienne, she shakes off all her insecurity and loses herself in the vision. But as soon as she gets some experience and confidence, Hanna stops identifying with a fictional hooker and takes the camera into her own hands.

I never found out why the student I talked to liked Vivre sa vie so much. But I’d like to think that in the movie’s dazzling images, she saw herself behind the camera crafting her own visions, like Hanna or Léa Pool, rather than confined on the screen within someone else’s. Set Me Free opens Friday at the Belcourt.

—Jim Ridley