Supposedly, Almost Famous is based on writer/director Cameron Crowe’s own experiences as a Rolling Stones journalist. In it he takes on the form so to say of the 15-years-old William Miller, who manages to be assigned the task of following the band Stillwater on their 1973 tour, by said publication. During this tour, we’re shown the underbelly of the music industry, all kinda filtered through the views imposed on William by his mentor Lester (the best act of the movie, brilliantly portrayed by the magnificent Philip Seymour Hoffman (by the way, check out Charlie Wilson’s War!), a kinda bitter music journalist whose main idea is that rock is dead, and that it’s all just business now. Observe:
Lester Bangs: Aw, man. You made friends with them. See, friendship is the booze they feed you. They want you to get drunk on feeling like you belong.
William Miller: Well, it was fun.
Lester Bangs: They make you feel cool. And hey. I met you. You are not cool.
William Miller: I know. Even when I thought I was, I knew I wasn’t.
Lester Bangs: That’s because we’re uncool. And while women will always be a problem for us, most of the great art in the world is about that very same problem. Good-looking people don’t have any spine. Their art never lasts. They get the girls, but we’re smarter.
William Miller: I can really see that now.
Lester Bangs: Yeah, great art is about conflict and pain and guilt and longing and love disguised as sex, and sex disguised as love… and let’s face it, you got a big head start.
William Miller: I’m glad you were home.
Lester Bangs: I’m always home. I’m uncool.
William Miller: Me too!
Lester Bangs: The only true currency in this bankrupt world if what we share with someone else when we’re uncool.
William Miller: I feel better.
Lester Bangs: My advice to you. I know you think those guys are your friends. You wanna be a true friend to them? Be honest, and unmerciful.
As for the question I asked in the opening paragraph — whether or not this one does for the 70s what Rock Star did for the 80s… Well, where Rock Star showed us a world where the commercial forces, the money artists, for a while were coming to be displaced by the music artists (towards the end that’s kinda what happened, anyway), Almost Famous jumped back to the era where those commercial forces took over for real, where the more feral spirit of the years around 1970 were being transformed into the utterly disgusting (in my humblest of humble opinions) trappings of Glam Rock and all that shit.
What Almost Famous did differently, though — and this is what ultimately makes it the better movie –, was that it took its time. It went a bit deeper, than Rock Star, in that it didn’t focus as much on the genre or the subculture or one single character. It looked at a journalist, a musician and his band, and a “groupie” who preferred the label “band-aid” (which is basically a girl who’s there because she loves the music, not because she wants to fuck a famous guy), and through the portrayal of these three characters (I was about to say “destinies”, but that sounds so bloody pretentious) it came out as a much more human, tender movie than did Rock Star.
But hey, it was still fun as Hell (okay, now there’s a weird metaphor…), and it entertained the crap out of me with its 70s atmosphere, its characterizations, and its human problems. Awesome movie.
9.0/10.
Also, brilliant soundtrack.
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