Almost Famous

This was a really enjoyable movie, and a reminder of a key point about creative work. The movie itself is semi-autobiographical, showing how a very young writer finds his way into the world of rock and roll journalism, traveling with a fictional band called Stillwater. The extras reveal that much of the story is a fictionalized account of real events, primarily those occurring on tours with Led Zeppelin and the Allman Brothers Band when the writer was just getting into the business.

The story centers on the young writer and his personal relationships with the guitarist from the band and a "band aide" who is romantically involved with the guitarist in spite of the fact that he's married. There are lots of laughs and good drama here. My favorites include just about any scene with the young writer and the groupie "Penny Lane" (Kate Hudson), who deservedly won a Best Supporting Actress award for her performance, and the bit where they're all on an airplane that they believe is about to crash and start confessing many secrets to each other, only to have the plane not actually crash.

As a former musician, the one thing that bothered me about this film is that the band dynamic felt all wrong to me. I understand that the story wasn't directly about the band, which is why we see so much more of the guitarist than his bandmates, but one of the oddities of band life is that it's virtually impossible to not have some kind of significant personal relationship with your bandmates. You might be great friends or the worst of enemies, or you may not really care about each other much one way or another, but you spend so much time together that it's impossible tell a story about one of you without the others being important to it. In this movie, it's clear that the lead singer is meant to represent the concerns of all of the other members of the band, and that the others, while physically present, aren't important to the story being told. I understand the need for economy of storytelling in a two hour movie, but I don't think the writer grasped how fully intertwined the personal lives of a real band become, even if they don't especially care about each other. Maybe that's my story to tell, one of these days.

In the "Making Of" extra, director/writer Cameron Crowe mentions that it's interesting to him that the most personal moments in the film for him were often the ones that seemed to have the most universal appeal to an audience. This is a powerful creative point. If something has personal meaning to the creative people involved and they can bring that across, odds are that you have strong, resonant creative work that will effect a lot of other people. Good to remember, and a very good movie, highly recommended.