Almost Famous

TCM ran Almost Famous during last year's 31 Days of Oscar. Not having seen it before, I decided to DVR it so I could watch and do a review on it at a later date. It's currently in the rotation of the Epix premium channels, and has an airing tomorrow (Feb. 22) at 5:55 PM on Epix2 and another showing Wednesday.

The movie starts in 1969. The Millers are a family in San Diego with widowed mom Elaine (Frances McDormand); daughter Anita (Zooey Deschanel), who is about to turn 18; and much younger William (Patrick Fugit). William is precocious, and Mom hasn't been telling him the truth about just how young he is, as he started first grade a year early and then skipped a grade later on, making him two years younger than all his classmates. Anita, meanwhile, has been chafing at Mom's inflexible rules, thinking rock and roll is the devil's music more or less. So now that Anita is 18 and of legal majority age, she moves out, moving to San Francisco and becoming a flight attendant although we don't see that until near the end of the movie.

Anita left her kid brother her stash of rock and roll records and William listened to them, becoming a big fan of the bands of the day. So much so that he tries writing articles about the bands and their new albums, getting the attention of Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman playing a real person) of the magazine Creem. Bangs hires young William to do a review of a concert, but William isn't able to get backstage, not being on "the list" -- if the person guarding the door isn't lying about it. Opening act Stillwater, a band that haven't hit the big time yet, are charmed by William, and they get him inside the facility.

Indeed, that's the start of a beautiful relationship. Having written a successful article about the concert, he's contacted by Ben Fong-Torres (Terry Chen playing another real person) from Rolling Stone magazine, wanting William to do a long-form article on Stillwater. This, however, is going to require William to go on tour with the band, and William is probably too young for that. Fortunately for him, however, none of the editors know his real age, at least not until they meet him which in the case of the Rolling Stone staff won't happen until near the end of the movie.

William gets sucked into the world of "almost famous" rock and roll, that being the artist who are able to do tours more than regionally, but not being real headliners doing arena rock or scoring Top 10 records. Stillwater still go from one venue to another by bus, and have their original manager, who was just a friend of lead singer Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup). You sense that the band members were friends for whom this is their first band and somehow they've managed to make it this far.

But it's a tough life for everybody, including groupies like Penny Lane (Kate Hudson), although dammit, she'll insist that you not call her a groupie, but a "Band Aide". Stillwater, with William in tow, start heading east on their tour, having all sorts of adventures, while William is trying to get an interview with Russell while also trying not to get too emotionally close to the band since that's going to detract from the interview.

A lot of Almost Famous feels episodic, and while there's not really anything wrong with that, the theoretical main plot of William trying to get the story feels at times like a Macguffin that's being given too much attention. Writer/director Cameron Crowe based this on his own real life experience of having been a teenaged writer who wound up on a rock and roll tour, so while it would be easy to scoff at the events depicted and wonder whether anything like that would happen in real life (Stillwater isn't a real band, but a composite of the bands Crowe covered), there's Crowe's past life to suggest maybe it's not so unrealistic.

I also have to admit that I didn't find myself quite so invested in the band, finding Frances McDormand's scenes to be the highlight of the movie. One wonders whether a real-life person would be this cluelessly intrusive; again, however, since Crowe based it on his own experience, it's probably less off the mark than one would think.

Almost Famous is a very well-made movie, although I have to say that it's one that people who prefer the Golden Age of the Hollywood studio system may have a bit of difficulty warming up to.