Almost Famous Review

Crowe adapting his own teenage years could have been a monument to himself and is instead unusually clear eyed about how small the story is. Stillwater are explicitly not a great band, the tour is grubby, and the film keeps noticing that the adults around William are children with better credit. Patrick Fugit is a good listener, which is the entire job, and John Toll shoots the buses and hotel corridors in a hazy gold that reads as memory without curdling into a filter.

Frances McDormand plays the mother as genuinely formidable rather than as a comic obstacle, and Philip Seymour Hoffman turns three scenes as Lester Bangs into the film's conscience, telling a boy that being uncool is the only honest position available to him. Kate Hudson has the hardest role and mostly transcends it, though the script's treatment of Penny Lane never fully escapes the fantasy it is trying to examine. The singalong on the bus works because it is about relief rather than joy. It is the warmest film of its year and it never quite lets itself off the hook.