Almost Famous at 25: Perfectly Uncool

25 Years Later, Almost Famous Remains Perfectly Uncool

Brad Pitt couldn’t wrap his head around it. The superstar was nearly set to play Russell Hammond, the enigmatic, charismatic guitarist of the fictional 1970s rock band Stillwater, in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, back when the movie was in pre-production (and still untitled; Untitled even made it all the way to the director’s cut on DVD). But one of the hottest stars in Hollywood ultimately left the project, the vague consensus being that he wasn’t quite vibing with the character. Crowe later speculated that maybe he liked Russell more in theory than in practice – that there wasn’t quite enough of Russell on the page.

That makes sense, because Almost Famous is mostly about young William Miller (Patrick Fugit), which is to say it’s about young Cameron Crowe, boy reporter. There are a few scenes from Russell’s point of view, but just as often we experience him from the opposite side of a hotel door, as he canoodles with underage groupie – excuse me, band aid – Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) and ducks William’s requests for an interview, even after buddying up to the also-underage reporter.

William is writing about Russell and the rest of his band for Rolling Stone. They don’t know that he’s 15. William himself came close to not knowing he was 15; it’s only a few years earlier that he learns he’s 11, not 12, because his mother Elaine (Frances McDormand) put him in school early. In a feat of remarkable pre-internet deception, William has only spoken to editor Ben Fong-Torres over the phone; on the basis of some other work, including an assignment from Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman), he’s assigned to go on the road and profile Stillwater, rising stars in the world of rock and roll. How far they’ll rise is an open question. When Lester Bangs tells William that he’ll meet his classmates again “on their long journey to the middle,” it’s hard not to wonder if that’s where Stillwater is ultimately headed, too, albeit to a more rarified version of it.

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That version of the middle effectively doesn’t exist anymore. It was still there back in 2000, when Almost Famous was first released, and rock-and-roll subgenres like alt-rock and nu-metal were still viable career paths. The industry apocalypse hadn’t quite arrived yet, but it was downloading. It’s almost better, though, that Almost Famous wasn’t produced later, when it might have been burdened with double the retrospective responsibility. It doesn’t need to say more about the bygone days of rock dominance, or to consider whether its point of view might be considered “rockist,” a term that became popularized a few years after Crowe’s movie came out. The perfectly crafted Stillwater songs do that critique for the movie: Their song “Fever Dog” is catchy. Their other stuff, well, it seems fine. Seems like it’s fun live. It’ll do in a pinch. Kinda had to be there. That sort of thing. Like so many internet fans after them, the band-aids seem to love the effort and the lore and the personalities involved as much as the music, even if Sapphire (Fairuza Balk) extols the virtue of loving “some silly little song” just that much.

Is it possible that Almost Famous has a similar halo effect on its own lovability? I think it’s better than that – a great movie, in fact – but it’s hard for me to say. I’ve watched Almost Famous so many times in both versions that two things have happened. The first is that nearly every intonation of every line of dialogue is so familiar to me that it’s impossible for me to judge the writing, or the performance of that writing, or the direction of the performance of that writing. There are times where an adult hearing some of Patrick Fugit’s line readings would probably identify him as a little stiff and over-rehearsed. I can tune up my grown-up ear and hear faint echoes of that quality, theoretically imagining how a more at-ease young actor might play these scenes. But William Miller is not especially at ease, even (especially?) when he’s awkwardly overflowing with excitement about the rock world he’s allowed to visit. He’s uncool, and uncool people can sound a little stiff or theatrical when they get worked up. It’s a quality embodied by Jason Lee, an actor of highly specific emphases. Crowe may be the only movie director to see Lee ranting about the kid on the escalator in Mallrats and see how that would translate to an insecure rock star. Lee kills every scene, line by line, by making it abundantly clear just how much less chill lead singer Jeff Bebe is than Russell.

It’s Crudup’s Russell Hammond who serves as the comparison point for pretty much all the other men in the movie – the “guitarist with mystique,” as Jeff describes their agreed-upon dynamic, who gives off an inimitable nonchalance. It’s a quality not far removed from what Pitt had brought to other roles (if not necessarily many of his best), so you can see why Crowe sought him for this one. You can also see why Pitt couldn’t quite lock into Russell. Crudup, having the year of his life between this and Jesus’ Son, gets his trickiest quality just right: the unspoken luxury of his charisma and how it makes him both aloof and feckless. It’s all the more remarkable because Crudup, while obviously a good-looking guy, isn’t in the same golden-god realm as Pitt at the turn of the century (who among us, etc.). For a couple of hours, he’s somehow better – no less beautiful, a little more weathered, with a touch of that Fuckhead innocence (amidst plenty of actual Fuckheadery).

The other thing that’s happened from so many viewings of Almost Famous is that I can finally see how the original theatrical release feels truncated at two hours. When I first watched the longer “bootleg cut,” it felt like a double-album version of an album you’d always known as a perfect single LP; all the extra stuff was great, but it’s not the version you know by heart. With time – with age, maybe? – it’s easier to see the places where the shorter cut feels interrupted by nagging commercial concerns. The longer version isn’t edgier or much different in tone. It just sprawls out more in a way that feels right. Hilariously, the bassist and the drummer of Stillwater don’t get much to do in those extra 40 minutes. (There’s actually a running gag about the drummer saying almost nothing.) With Hudson’s Penny Lane, though, every extra minute counts, even (or, again, especially!) if she’s just dancing to Cat Stevens in an empty auditorium.

That scene is just one example of how Almost Famous is nicer than the other class-of-2000 movies addressing similar subjects. Wonder Boys has an eye and an ear for writerly pretensions and how they get tangled up with the academic life and a middle-aged man’s self-image. (The option isn’t available to William, but we know that the lead character has made some steps to getting his life right when we see him converted to composing on a computer, like a normal person.) High Fidelity, meanwhile, admits how toxic music fandom can be, even as it invites the audience into the snobby clubbiness it engenders. By comparison, Crowe’s movie is positively starry-eyed about both; as much as Lester Bangs rants about sycophantic, fawning rock-writing tripe that will ruin rock and roll, Crowe’s version is too polite to call anyone out with actual examples of bad journalism, bad criticism, or bad music.

Yet the very niceness that should mark Crowe as a sentimental sap lends Almost Famous a humanist purity. It is truly not that concerned with the technical rigors of great writing or great pop music, and absolutely intoxicated with what those things might be able to communicate. It saves its emotional rawness for the pain of a barely-formed love triangle, where William loves Penny, Penny loves Russell, and Russell loves…? Well, William’s attention, certainly, but there’s almost no chance that either William or Russell will get what they really want out of these entanglements (if Russell even knows). Some have criticized the movie for sanitizing Stillwater’s antics, but the movie isn’t following their point of view; it’s following William, who isn’t pursuing filthy new lows (and who does threesome away his virginity, by the way, as well as kiss Penny while she’s barely conscious). Crowe is more at home with smaller gestures of heartbreak: The way that Hudson, after Penny learns that she’s been “traded” to Humble Pie for a case of beer, gathers her hurt before asking “what kind of beer?” and then smiling, slightly, at her own attempt at deflection.

For all of the movie’s sweetness, for all of its reluctance to punish the characters with tragedy, the major characters all end with some bittersweet sense of something lost: William lives in the same city as Penny, but they’re not in the same world even before she leaves for Morocco. Jeff and Russell reconcile, for now, but they’re back to the old tour bus, perhaps sensing from their brush with the cover of Rolling Stone that Stillwater isn’t heading to Zeppelin-like heights. Elaine gets William (and her daughter Anita, played wonderfully by a young Zooey Deschanel) back, but for how long? Outside the text of the movie, Philip Seymour Hoffman is gone, making his scenes opposite Fugit (he doesn’t play opposite anyone else but a bit-player DJ) ache all the more.

There’s also a little retrospective bittersweetness in how Crowe never made a better movie. Vanilla Sky works as a dysfunctional pop-culture-saturated B-side; nothing since has been more than fits and starts. I don’t hold that against him, particularly. The warmth of this movie, if bottled, could solve an energy crisis. Crowe has a memoir out soon, The Uncool, revisiting this time in his life, presumably closer to the truth if still likely skewed by decades of both perspective and faded memories. I don’t know if I want to read it. Almost Famous is uncool enough for me.

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.

25 Years Later, Almost Famous Remains Perfectly Uncool