Almost Famous
Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters
What tips you off to Almost Famous is the beginning, actually, the credits themselves. What we see is a disembodied hand, wielding a pencil on a lined yellow legal pad. The hand writes the title of the movie, and then the actors names, and then gets to Frances McDormand. “Francis McDormand”, the hand writes, and then realizes its error, erases the offending “i”, and then completes the name.
The hand, we’re told, belongs to Cameron Crowe, the talented director/writer/producer of Jerry Maguire and Say Anything, and a man possessed of Olympian talent. (That is to say, he’s the best in his field, but we only see him once every four years.). The handwritten titles are not merely a clever trick or a low-budget cost-saving measure, instead, they send a powerful, subtle message. This is going to be Cameron Crowe’s movie, the work of his hands and his spirit and his own creative voice. This is going to be — in stark contrast to the mass-marketed multitudes of mediocre movies — a deeply personal work, stamped with a quiet independence. This is going to be, also, a movie that’s possessed with a subtle, dry humor, a movie that’s not afraid to poke gentle fun at the conventions. That’s a lot for one hand to promise, but it’s a promise that Crowe more than fulfills.
Almost Famous tells the story of Crowe’s experiences as an improbably — but not impossibly — young reporter for Rolling Stone magazine. Patrick Fugit plays William Miller, the fictional stand-in for Crowe, and it is here that we first touch on a bit of Crowe’s genius. Think about it. You’re choosing someone to play you, as a teenager. There would be — there would have to be — a temptation to choose someone pretty, someone self-assured, a polished actor who could deliver all of the lines in the movie that you never got to say in high school. It is to Crowe’s eternal credit that he chose Fugit, a scruffy-looking kid with a huge puffy haircut and a geeky voice that gets worse when he tries to sound older. Fugit is painfully earnest, and gets off some lines of dialogue that sound incomprehensible but are authentic in their very awkwardness. There hasn’t been an adolescent performance this honest, this smart since Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore — although the performances are worlds apart; Fugit is much more passive, much more reactive.
Crowe gives Fugit quite a lot to react to, starting with two of the best small performances of the year. The incomparable Frances McDormand plays Fugit’s mom, in what ought to be a thankless role but is not. In lesser hands, McDormand’s character might have been a stereotypical worrying mom, out of step with the hip, cool culture. There are elements of that in her performance, to be sure. When the older sister (played by the young actress Zooey Deschanel, whom you’ll recognize later by her improbably big blue eyes) tells McDormand that her little brother is considered a “nark”, McDormand has to ask for a translation, and then asks, “Narcotics officer? What’s wrong with that?” But when Fugit asks her for permission to go on tour with a rock band, she relents so completely that it’s hard to think that part of her isn’t excited by the opportunity.
Most of what we see from McDormand is over the phone after that (especially the most memorable scene of the movie, where she finally gets to speak her mind to a bona fide rock’n'roller). Phillip Seymour Hoffman also has to do most of his acting over the phone; he plays Fugit’s muse, a dissolute, cynical rock critic named Russell Bangs. Hoffman is spookily good as the uber-critic, dispensing pearls of wisdom to the young journalist. “Be honest, and be ruthless”, he tells Fugit, and he even applies that honesty to himself in a wry meditation on the essential uncoolness of writing.
Those are the uncool characters, but Crowe gives equal time to the cool characters. Almost Famous takes place in the years when being in a rock-n-roll band was the coolest thing that any teenage boy could hope to be. (We see that happen on the walls of Fugit’s room, even, the posters change from the astronauts to The Who.) Jason Lee and Billy Crudup are the leaders of a band called Stillwater, a fictional composite of the different bands that Crowe wrote about, and they’re relaxed and high-spirited and funny and… well…. cool. The band meets Fugit on a ramp leading into a San Diego concert venue, and bring him along on the tour for their new album, “Almost Famous”. (The title of the band’s next album is one of the biggest hoots in the movie that’s chock-full of humor.)
I hadn’t seen Lee in anything since Kevin Smith’s Dogma, and had to be reminded which character he played. He’s the lead singer, and he’s impressive in that role, but he’s not the leader of the band or of the movie. When the band’s T-shirts arrive, featuring Crudup prominently, he has his best scene, railing about just being one of the “out-of-focus guys”. (An apt comparison, most of the minor characters are more or less out-of-focus in the movie, slipping in and out of the picture.) Crudup, we’re told, is the “guitarist with mystique”, and it’s his mystique that carries the movie. Fugit chases him throughout the movie, tape recorder in hand, vainly trying to get an exclusive interview, but Crudup is almost always a step ahead. He’s enigmatic and magnetic, whether he’s screaming about being a golden god (while high on LSD and beer) or confiding his secrets to Fugit in the background. One suspects that Crowe created the role for Tom Cruise, but Crudup does such a good job that there’s almost no way that Tom Terrific could have improved the movie.
That’s high praise (maybe not, if you’re not a Cruise fan), and you’d expect Crudup to get the biggest career boost of all the ensemble cast. But if you remember anyone from this movie ten years from now, you’ll remember Kate Hudson, who plays super-groupie Penny Lane. Hudson is just flat-out adorable in this movie, and the camera loves her with a passion straight out of a cheap romance novel. You won’t remember very much that she says, mind you, Crowe doesn’t give her many good lines to speak of. But the way she looks when she’s on the bus… when she’s in the field, talking to Fugit… when she’s on the empty, flower-strewn stage in Cleveland… when she’s on the plane headed back west… when she’s in the restaurant in New York, with Elton John’s “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” in the background… well… it’s a performance that will stick with you for a long time.
“You’re taking notes with your eyes,” Crudup tells Fugit at one point, and it’s probably the truest thing that he says. That’s exactly what Fugit is doing because it’s exactly what Cameron Crowe must have done. Not only did Crowe see the excesses and the joys and the pain of the mid 70’s rock and roll tour existence, he remembered it, and thought about it, and wrote about it, and recreated it, and shares it with us now. What we see is a deeply personal vision that manages to be hilarious and warm and touching and inspiring and all sorts of other wonderful, wonderful things. Crowe received two Oscar nominations for Jerry Maguire, and it would be a crime against humanity if he doesn’t come away with at least one statuette this year; he’s written a great script and directed and produced a great movie.