Almost Famous is a case study in disconnects between form and content. Like its protagonist, William (Patrick Fugit), Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical recounting of his days as a 1970s kid music journalist is confused — about whether it’s reverential or critical of the classic rock scene in which it embeds itself, and if it’s a precise recreation of that milieu or just a hazy recollection. What we’re left with is a tepid, rather flavorless nostalgia piece caught between the wide-eyed, blank-slate perspective of William and the high ground of hindsight. (On this latter tip: the fictional rock band Stillwater’s replacement manager asserting that Mick Jagger surely won’t have rock star aspirations by age 50. Little did he know!)
The film’s jumbled point of view is most evident in its cutting, which often verges on the amateurish — editors Joe Hutshing and Saar Klein’s work is temporally and spatially inconsistent but not dreamy or addled, as if the movie were as blazed as its characters — just clipped and awkward. We see this early on when William first makes contact with critic Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman). The two walk down the street as Bangs offers the boy his jaded takes on the state of rock ’n’ roll, before he dismisses him, grumbling that he “can’t stand around all day and talk to [his] fans.” The film then cuts to the pair sitting in an oddly empty coffee shop, in the same clothes, on clearly the same day. The edit isn’t done in a manner that makes it register as a joke smash cut, nor is the film operating in some kind of ethereal space where time and sequential order don’t matter. No, it just feels oddly unexplained and clunky — why are these guys still talking? And who’s running this coffee shop?
Ditto a later scene, right after the cringe-inducing Mick Jagger comment, when Crowe cues up Cat Stevens’ “The Wind” and we watch groupie Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) prance around a concert hall amid post-show debris. It’s a moment apropos of nothing, but a nice, potentially atmospheric interlude, nonetheless. However, instead of lingering in this interstitial, Crowe and his editors exit the sequence harshly, and switch on “Voodoo Child” by Jimi Hendrix, right as they were almost pulling off a lovely moment.
Indeed, many scenes feel either just a few beats too long or too short; for a film about music, it’s deeply unrhythmic. Perhaps the bit in which the editing most calls attention to itself is Penny’s overdose at Gramercy Park, where, as William calls for help and witnesses her stomach being pumped, Crowe and co. flash to William’s high school graduation across the country, where his mother, Elaine (Frances McDormand), is in attendance without him. It’s an admittedly striking dichotomy, but it also feels ham-fisted and furthers the notion that Penny is in relation to the film as she is to William and the band members: a symbol but not a real woman, something to be used to elicit feelings but not be properly understood.
For a story that’s adapted from a real-life experience Crowe had tagging along on a tour with the Allman Brothers Band and writing about it for Rolling Stone, Almost Famous is strangely light on arresting details or stirring specificities. In fact, it even contains some anachronisms and inaccuracies — when William is flipping through the LPs his rebellious sister Anita (Zooey Deschanel) gifts him upon deserting the homestead (and why would she not take them with her, exactly?), there are multiple albums in the stack that were released after 1969, when the scene supposedly takes place. Joni Mitchell’s Blue is in there, released a full two years later. The most charitable explanation for this is that the film is attempting to mimic the unreliable, transient nature of memory, which is occasionally affirmed by, for instance, Elaine’s commentary on To Kill a Mockingbird overlapping between two totally distinct places, as if the person recalling it can’t remember where they were exactly.
But the movie’s visual approach doesn’t assist in communicating this at all. It’s largely a blandly styled and televisual film, which feels like a huge missed opportunity and a strange choice for something that’s supposed to be a fluidly told reminiscence bathed in the warm glow of the past. The period details aren’t lavish or reincarnated with an aesthetically rich joy, like those in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. There are no, or very few, eye-catching outfits or studious set dressings. The film mostly takes place in hotel rooms, and no one does much to make those very interesting to look at (OK, I guess the Rolling Stone office is pretty neat).
In Almost Famous’ most well-known scene, the up-and-coming band at the film’s center, Stillwater, sing Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” together in unison after a moment of strife. Again, it’s a casualty of sloppy technical work, as the song is seemingly playing over the radio and the band members each start to join in, one by one, but instead, the song is playing nondiegetically on the film’s soundtrack, so they’re just singing along with something they can’t hear. Nonetheless, it’s still moving, in large part because the song is so undeniable. That is, until, at the back of the bus, William says to Penny, “I need to go home.” And Penny responds, “You are home.” It’s a massive groaner of a line that undercuts the sweeping pathos Elton had drummed up, and worse still, reveals the film’s absence of an identifiable perspective. Are we to nod our heads in emphatic agreement with her or roll our eyes at her fanaticism? Unfortunately, Almost Famous doesn’t do an adequate job of nurturing either distorted romanticism or thoughtful skepticism. It ends in a place of generalist nothingness (“What do you love about music?” “Everything”) and calls it a day.
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