Almost fabulous

Crowe's Famous beats the band

by Peter Keough

ALMOST FAMOUS, Directed and written by Cameron Crowe. With Patrick Fugit, Kate Hudson, Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jason Lee, Anna Paquin, Fairuza Balk, Zooey Duschanel, Noah Taylor, and Michael Angarano. A DreamWorks Pictures release. At the Fenway, the Harvard Square, and the Circle and in the suburbs.

Will "I am a golden god!" become the "Show me the money!" of the new millennium? Probably not, but this acid-induced cry of embarrassing ecstasy sums up the spirit of 1973, when everyone thought he or she was capable of beauty and greatness and everything seemed possible and everything was about to fall apart. Cameron Crowe's semi-autobiographical Almost Famous, his second-best picture to date (I still hold out for Say Anything), gets that period and spirit almost right.

And well it should. Crowe himself was in the thick of the scene as probably the youngest rock critic ever, a 15-year-old wunderkind covering the likes of Led Zeppelin and the Who. Here he goes under the name of William Miller (Michael Angarano), who's first seen as an earnest junior high-schooler witnessing the rift between his older sister, Anita (a vivid Zooey Duschanel), and his widowed mother, Elaine (Frances McDormand, a defining presence in the film, though she spends most of it grimacing on the phone), a determined educator who combines liberal causes with draconian fascism. Mom is against sex and drugs and rock and roll as well as pollution, and her oppressiveness, which the young William shakes off, goads Anita into rebellion. "This is the reason I'm leaving home to become a stewardess," she announces, putting Simon and Garfunkel's "America" on the turntable. She departs, leaving William with a treasure -- her record collection -- under his bed.

The scene summarizes all that's brilliant and questionable about Almost Famous: a sublime blend of absurdity and pathos, an acute ear for the perfect tune (not the obvious "She's Leaving Home"), and a compulsion to leave them laughing. I mean, does Anita have to be wearing hair curlers? A more basic problem is the passivity of the protagonist; even as a kid, William hangs back and observes. He's the critic as hero, and his cause is to resist the temptations of involvement and remain "honest and unmerciful."

Such is the credo instilled in him three years later by his new mentor, legendary rock critic Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman, as usual stealing the show). Played by impressive newcomer Patrick Fugit, William has evolved into a seemingly naive eager beaver with an edge of canny wisdom, and it's not hard to believe he could be writing for national magazines like Bangs's Creem. William learns quickly, employing the age-old tactics of bullshit and ass kissing to wangle a backstage pass to a Stillwater concert. Then there's no stopping him, as Rolling Stone calls out of nowhere to assign him a potential cover story about the band, and against his mother's better judgment ("Don't take drugs!" is a nagging leitmotif) he gets on the bus for Stillwater's "Almost Famous" tour.

This is the acid test for both William and the movie -- and both pass with qualifications. He doesn't take drugs, though perhaps he should have, or maybe the viewer should, because otherwise Stillwater sound like a pallid heavy-metal knockoff. An unavoidable flaw, perhaps -- inventing a rock-and-roll band for the purposes of a show hasn't worked since the Monkees. Consequently, in this movie about the religion of rock, not much time is spent in the concert hall.

Backstage, meanwhile, the tone varies from This Is Spinal Tap to The Wonder Years as in the midst of the wacky, interband bickering, a tentative triangle emerges involving William, lead-guitarist Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), and superstar groupie (or "band-aid," as she insists on being called) Penny Lane. Played by Kate Hudson, who looks like her mother, Goldie Hawn, of the same period, she's an ephemeral naiad of the kind that inspires hit songs and ends up on album covers (as Hudson does on the soundtrack CD, the best since High Fidelity). And William loves her.

Or so he says. He's got to be the least horny kid of the sexual revolution -- after a troupe of "band-aids" (including Anna Paquin and Fairuza Balk in tart cameos) "deflower" him, the first thing he can think to do is look for his notes. He's a romantic -- outraged when Penny is bartered off to another band for a case of beer -- but his role as rescuing knight in one key scene loses steam because of the expectations of comic relief set up throughout the film. Neither did I get much of a sense of his attraction to the "golden god" Russell, either homoerotic or emulative.

What does come across, however, is his conviction that the music and the feelings they arouse matter enough to make writing about it his life. You can sense this in the many shots of the bus on the road as the haggard bunch listen to Elton John's "Tiny Dancer" (yes, one recalls with a pang, he was cool once too) and sing along, and in William's late-night calls to the doomed Bangs, who in his W.C. Fields burr assures the boy that it all does mean something. At least as far as its passion is concerned, Almost Famous is almost perfect.