Almost Famous

ALMOST FAMOUS

Rating: B-
You get the impression from watching Almost Famous that writer/director Cameron Crowe is trying to convey some higher meaning to his audience. The challenge is wading through the soft-focus plot as it wanders all over the place in order to figure out just what that meaning is.

Patrick Fugit plays an ambitious kid in high school in 1973 who is obsessed with becoming a rock and roll writer. Think Creem and Rolling Stone magazine. Through a combination of initiative and luck, he lands a freelance assignment with Rolling Stone to interview the members of an up-and-coming band named Stillwater as they embark on a national tour. Early on, he meets groupies Kate Hudson and Fairuza Balk, who take a liking to his innocence and naiveté. Complications arise when he falls in love with Hudson, who for her part has eyes for band member Billy Crudup. Add to this all the partying, inter-band squabbling, and perpetual confusion of the tour, and it seems like Fugit may never get a chance to pin down Crudup for an interview.

The film earns high marks for its originality, at least to the degree that it seems fresh compared to most of the crap we've been dealt this summer. (It's getting to the point where any film that isn't about a serial killer or another insipid romantic comedy seems worthy of special gratitude.) Philip Seymour Hoffman, continuing his streak of appearing in every movie made in the last decade, plays a crusty rock and roll writer who never sold out his principles. He laments how the rock scene has disintegrated into a pre-packaged, mass-marketed product devoid of any soul or meaning. (And this is in 1973; what would he have thought about Gerardo and Vanilla Ice?) Unfortunately, this idea, like several others, is cast aside as soon as it's brought up rather than being developed further by the plot. Another example is when Hoffman repeatedly advises Fugit not to become friends with the band, but instead to keep everyone at arm's length so as not to lose his objectivity as a writer. Although Fugit wrestles with this dilemma several times in the movie, ultimately the fact that he breaks the rule has no negative consequences. Why make such a point about it, then drop the whole subject halfway through the movie?

Another problem is Crudup's relationship with Kate Hudson. His feelings for her seem to change nebulously from scene to scene as the plot demands, but it's never credible that Hudson could really believe he loved her. I mean, she sees what goes on every day on the tour, right? Then, later, when Crudup has an awakening of conscience, it seems less like character growth and more like convenient scriptwriting. Maybe I'm just cynical.

One of my favorite scenes is a short vignette where Fugit's high school graduation (which he must forefeit because he's with the tour) is intercut with scenes of him with the band. Although his classmates seem to have the head start entering the "real world," Fugit has already experienced more of life on the tour than many of them will experience for years to come. It's scenes like this, interspersed throughout the film, which make the movie worth seeing.