Almost Famous- Cameron Crowe (2000)

Halfway through Almost Famous, there’s a scene in which Kate Hudson—never more coquettish—surveys the detritus of a concert. She slides on used programs and twirls across scuffed floors as Cat Stevens whispers over the soundtrack. For a movie that’s more plot-driven than most people remember, it’s a dream-like intermission.

Even if it does divide a more hopeful first half from a more cynical second half, the scene fits in with the rest of Almost Famous because all of its world is a dream. It’s an unreliable yet loving memory of composites. Yes, Stillwater is basically the Allman Brothers, and Russell Hammond, the guitar player with mystique, is basically Jimmy Page. So what? The power of the film does not lies in its spare “dood, did he really have a threesome when he was fifteen?” parts. It comes from Crowe’s memoirist alchemy of combining the vigor of adolescence with the wisdom and nostalgia of adulthood.

For example, early on, Zooey Deschanel’s character Anna is in an argument with her mother, who is clearly informed by Crowe’s own mom. (Few works are as transparently autobiographical.) Anna screams, “This is a house of lies,” and it comes from a very real place of adolescent frustration. But that line is so loaded with the melodrama of being that age, of generalized judgments about the world around her, that we as adults are supposed to patronize it. We’ve almost been trained to. Years ago in a theater that no longer exists, I saw this idea hammered home a few scenes later, when Anna explains that the sentiment of “America” by Simon and Garfunkel is the reason she is leaving home. All of the middle-aged people around me laughed, thinking it slight that a silly song they had all forgotten could sum up a moment that significant. I slumped in my seat, embarrassed that, for a split second, I thought the idea was a bit romantic. I believed in that same artistic purity and purpose that Anna did, despite all of the social cues I was given. Besides the fact that it sounds cool, I named this blog “A House of Lies” because I want to harness that naive adolescent vitality but weigh it down with the deflated wisdom of the intervening years. Almost Famous is an attempt to stop time and drink in a moment that we’ll never get back. It’s a celebration of the moving and engaging ephemera that Crowe still loves, but it’s commenting just as much on his own life and informal education. That’s what I’m aiming for I guess.

In the third act we get another dose of that complicated treatment of the past when Ben Fong-Torres brags to William that a nearby office has a Mojo, a rudimentary fax machine that can send a page every eighteen minutes.This is one of Crowe’s more facile gags—technology that used to be state-of-the-art is now laughable!—but it underlines that the whole environment of the film is passe. This is a love letter to a setting that has clearly set, and that notion is what adds a layer of heartbreak to the proceedings. An unproven reporter gets to spend weeks with a band to craft a sought-after cover story? Such a thing as an independent concert promoter exists? In light of everything that has happened in the intervening ten years, you might as well be watching The Lord of the Rings. Emotionally, Crowe is conflicted: he’s a middle-aged child. In other ways though, the movie has taken on a purely elegiac veneer.

Perhaps I’m giving too much credit to Crowe’s thematic ambiguity. It’s clear whose side he would be on in that theater I mentioned earlier. Nearly two hours after the house of lies scene, the ever-sagacious Polexia sums up the movie with: “They don’t even know what it is to be a fan. I mean, to truly love some silly little piece of music or some band so much that it hurts.” Although he was forty-three when he directed the film, Crowe still had more in common with her and the junior-in-high-school version of me than he did with all of the soccer moms laughing. If that’s not incendiary, I don’t know what is.

Beginning a decade that cannibalized itself into superhero films and stymied bottle rockets of franchises, this is, in every way, a Personal Film. Hell, the chicken scratch super-imposed on all of the inserts is Crowe’s hand-writing. It’s literally hand-made nostalgia on Dreamworks’ $60 million tab. I could go on and on about Billy Crudup’s instinctual performance and John Toll’s sumptuous photography and the line “let’s just go get some barbecue or something” and the way Sherman at the front desk says “handful.” There are hundreds of tiny moments lovingly recreated here, and I’ve seen it so many times that I can quote them all. Not since Home Alone, when my brother and I acted the whole thing through, have I been attached to a movie and eager to enjoy it all again in such a purely child-like way.

There were a lot of movies that were deeper and more artfully made, but the reason why Almost Famous is my favorite film of the aughts is the theoretical focus that Crowe brings to it. He’s able to exalt the experience of being young, but he combines that with a realistic and astute measure that he can’t even help but feel. Most artists try to act older than they are, to bring a God-like objectivity to their work. Crowe is still a guy trying to be young. In that way, it’s all happening.