Review of Almost Famous (2000) by Simeon T — 15 Apr 2016

This was my favorite film for years after I saw it. It is pure magic. It is insufficient to call it an all-time coming of age, adventure or rock movie. It is a wondrous evocation of an extended moment, a living reflection of a dream (if you will) seen through starry eyes. It is an imagining and depiction of the beautiful futility of finding and holding on to a moment and its afterglow, the sustain after the guitar solo, or if you will, the empty auditorium. And finally, the clarity to let it be a wrinkle in time.

Cameron Crowe did something here no one else could do or will do. More than any other respected filmmaker, he fearlessly dances with sentimentality, striving for poignance, even if it ends up as schmaltz. This has yielded uneven results in his prior catalogue, but In Almost Famous, it is always the former and never the latter. He dares to find innocent love, of more than one variety, at the peak of 70's rock and roll greatness, before all that was left was druggy burnout. He dares to make the most easily caricatured fixture, the groupie (err....bandaid), a stunning embodiment of vulnerability, confusion, curiosity and sparkle. Penny Lane, brought to incandescent life by Kate Hudson, is one of the all-time great characters in cinema, because she is everything she appears to be yet so much more. That is the secret to the indelible characters in this movie. They seem like flesh and blood visions of the mythical haze of early 70's rock culture, which they are, but they're also earthy and recognizable, in their hopes and vulnerabilities.

This movie is a lovely paean to the pop-American experience, a snapshot of the collective trip of 70's rock culture as a vision of the American Dream, mythical yet frozen in memory, yearned for and felt if never entirely realized.