Almost Famous
Before becoming director of films such as Singles and Jerry Maguire, Cameron Crowe worked as a pop journalist for Rolling Stone magazine. With Almost Famous he filmed his own initiation into the music world. The ultimate vanity? No, one of the most heart-wrenching movies ever made about pop music.
Almost famous is not a realistic film, but a fairy tale. Small events have been magnified and the atmosphere in the American rock scene that is not (any longer) so pleasant in the year 1973 has been consciously romanticized. Still, it's an honest film. Almost famous is Cameron Crowe's personal truth and he cannot be caught lying in the telling of it. Not even in the scene where the budding, fifteen-year-old pop journalist William Miller (Patrick Fugit) is deflowered by a bunch of groupies. It falls into the same category as the scene in High fidelity in which John Cusack, a second-hand record dealer, experiences a night of love with a beautiful singer-songwriter — the category in which the wish fathers the thought and the line between reality and fantasy is a bit thinner than usual. And embellishing the truth, as any journalist knows, is quite different from lying.
The vast majority of scenes in Almost Famous are taken from real life. It is, for example, tragicomic and recognizable how Miller tries to gain access to the dressing room of Black Sabbath through the back entrance of the concert hall during his first journalistic assignment. First he is berated by a blunt security man. Then he is speechless when the band members arrive and pass him without batting an eyelid. The groupies think he's cute, but they have their own priorities. The more William walks up and down the access road, the funnier the scene gets. Only when he treats the members of the (fictional) support act Stillwater to exactly the right praises, he is allowed inside.
The spiritual growth process that William goes through during the tour with Stillwater following that first meeting, is also written so subtly that it bears the signature of someone who was there himself. Patrick Fugit is William Miller is Cameron Crowe. The great thing about Fugit's acting is that he is in almost every scene, yet often barely noticeable and blends effortlessly into the ensemble, in which Kate Hudson plays a starring role as Band Aid Penny Lane ("no sex, just blow jobs").
With his goofy grin and disarming charm, William captivates everyone while registering what's going on around him. Like a fly on the wall, he is present during ego trips, quarrels and other conversations between band members and management that are not really intended for his ears. "I tell secrets to the one person I can't tell secrets to," Stillwater guitarist Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup) exclaims at one point in confusion, realizing too late that even a nice journalist is always a journalist. When the Stillwater members eventually deny everything in Williams' story, the Rolling Stone editors decide not to publish the story and the budding journalist is dropped like a brick.
It is easy to see how the mentality of historical figures such as Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner and the then editor-in-chief Ben Fong-Torres is at odds with that of the legendary, early deceased rock critic Lester Bangs. While the latter believed that pop journalists should be critical and independent at all times, Rolling Stone quickly learned that befriending artists helped sales in the long run.
Almost famous is therefore set at an intersection in pop history. The time when the idealism of the sixties was slowly but surely corrupted by advancing commerce and once rebellious musicians started to behave more and more like the kings of a new elite. That is, if they didn't perish from drink, drugs and plane crashes.
What you can object to on the film is that the glasses through which Cameron Crowe looks at the past have very pink lenses. Almost famous is therefore the work of a dreamer who, despite the fact that he has learned to live in reality, has never stopped longing. That is precisely why he was able to retain the innocence of his youth and to pour it into the (Oscar-winning screenplay) in its purest form. The light, brilliant colors in which cameraman John Toll has captured Crowe's memories fit well with a film in which an almost famous musician narrowly chooses his human side, a groupie just barely dies of an overdose and a boy turns into a man without to get rid of the boy in the man. It fits well with the indestructible optimism that the rainbow-colored Almost Famous radiate.