It's early 1970's and you're "Almost Famous," or kind of, or, at least, you hang out with the ones who are. And that's no small thing when you're 15 years old and writing for the "Rolling Stone."
Director Cameron Crowe's new film recounts the director's own experiences doing just that. Crowe bases the movie's band, Stillwater, on the enormously popular Led Zeppelin, with the group's blessings.(Crowe did actually interview the Led Zeppelin in 1975.)
The over achieving teenage journalist, called William Miller (Patrick Fugit), gets what the New Yorker magazine calls the "fairy tale assignment" of following Stillwater on the road. Already an underground rock-star reporter, Miller, with his cherubic looks, and big-time ambitions, can be deceptive. At first, he seems to have an edge, as he chronicles the antics of Stillwater, the "laid back, groupie hopping, drugged out" group, in the words of one critic.
The antics don't stop, as band star Russell (Billy Crudup) threatens to jump off a roof during an especially effective acid trip. And the band plays on, with what one reviewer calls "exuberant shamelessness . . . perhaps the last time that boogie-down male rock stars could truly believe that the world belonged to them."
There's a remarkably good cast, including Frances McDormand (of Coen Brothers and Fargo fame) as Miller's adoring college prof mother, who has had him skipped two grades in school, something she now doubts the wisdom of. As the tour rolls on, the music gets greater, or, at least, louder, the times get wilder, and Miller's journalistic perspective strays in the shuffle. Crowe received an Academy Award nomination for "Jerry Maguire," and it looks like another winner here. Called an "astonishingly perfect glimpse at the early seventies," the critics offer not one discouraging word.
It is rated R for language, drug content and brief nudity.
