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When FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH came out, it was 1982 and I was in the first of my consecutive senior years at SUNY Stony Brook. I was running the film committee and writing film reviews for the school paper, and saw for myself a future of poverty, but one full of intellectual and artistic fulfillment. 26 years later and I’m a lawyer. Some dreams die hard. But back to 1982.
FAST TIMES was a revelation. Like ANIMAL HOUSE, which came out just before my freshman year, TIMES was a touchstone for a generation. Aside from the fact that a lot of talented actors got their starts in that film (Forest Whitaker, Nicolas Cage, Anthony Edwards, Judge Reinhold and Eric Stoltz), it featured Phoebe Cates and Jennifer Jason Leigh (both baring a lot of skin, god bless `em) and Sean Penn’s star-making turn as the stoner-surfer dude Spicoli. It was one of the first honest movies I’d ever seen about high school.
Having been raised on Godard, Andrew Sarris and the auteur theory, I credited first time director Amy Heckerling for the film’s wonders. Time has not borne out that gross conclusion, as her career has included JOHNNY DANGEROUSLY, EUROPEAN VACATION and LOOK WHO’S TALKING (1 and TOO) and LOSER. I paid little attention to the fact that someone actually wrote the movie (not only wrote it, but based it on his own book). A kid named Cameron Crowe (was that his REAL name?) went under cover in a Southern California high school, wrote a book about what he saw, then adapted it as a screenplay. It still stands up as a brilliant, journalistic insight into the early 80s and adolescence.
Of course, Crowe went on to do a few more quite excellent movies, as both writer and director. SAY ANYTHING, with Jon Cusack, is a tragi-comic tale of young love that has developed a cult audience. When asked by the girl’s father what he wants to do for a living, with a nod to THE GRADUATE, Cusack says:
“I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.”
After FAST TIMES at High School, SAY ANYTHING said everything about that scary time right after graduation. Crowe’s next picture, SINGLES, talks about relationships amongst 20-somethings, during and after college, in the era of Seattle grunge garage bands. It’s a flawed movie, but he obtained one of the handful of great Matt Dillon performances ever recorded on film. The use of music in FAST TIMES, SAY ANYTHING and SINGLES is integral to the characters, not just an excuse to release a soundtrack album. When Cusack stands outside his girl’s apartment in SAY ANYTHING, he holds a boom box over his head blasting Peter Gabriel while standing in the rain. He’s using music to communicate from his soul and it’s one of the most moving moments from any movie in the last 20 years.
Then, writer-director-producer Crowe created JERRY MAGUIRE, his first breakout-commercial Hollywood mega-hit. Despite that reputation, the movie is really about a young guy finding some personal commitment and professional redemption. Or is it vice versa? Doesn’t matter… it works both ways. The movie is actually a small, personal film at heart. Except, you know, with Tom Cruise. And it made a star of Renee Zellweger.
If you look closely, you can see the arc of Mr. Crowe’s films as they mirror his own journey from precocious adolescent to successful professional, with an in-depth analysis of the painful and necessary growth endured at each stage of his life, with music always seeming to mark the trail he has taken. Now a successful 40-something, Crowe does what we all do at that stage. He looks backwards, with longing. And so, in ALMOST FAMOUS, he offers us a loving reflection on his youth and the music that lit the way.
With this picture, Crowe does the impossible… he made me nostalgic for the 70s. Now, at this point, “let me make something perfectly clear.” The 70s sucked. I don’t mean for me, personally. Well, yeah, I mean for me personally, but not JUST for me. I’ll say it again. THE 70s SUCKED. You weren’t there. I was. Trust me on this, if nothing else. The clothes, the TV, the music, the politics, the national zeitgeist. It all sucked. Everything but the movies. This was the era of Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, Lucas. The auteur-inmates were running the studio-asylums and brilliant, personal pictures were being made by big studios for big money. Of course, Cimino’s HEAVEN’S GATE sunk UA and Hollywood has never been that way again. But I digress. Back to my point. THE 70s SUCKED. And yet… somehow, thanks to Crowe, they’ve taken on that burnished glow that only memory can endow. Before we praise him, or damn him, further for this accomplishment, let’s take a closer look at how he did it.
Crowe starts his film with credits... not an unusual technique. Except these credits are being written in pencil on a yellow note pad by a disembodied hand. The hand writes out each name, even misspelling “Frances McDormand” then erasing the error and fixing it. The credits have not even finished and I already love this movie. Why? It has a point of view. This in not some generic, Hollywood story, measured and sliced with a cookie-cutter called “market research.” This is a personal story being told by somebody. And a young somebody, to boot… inexperienced, but gamely writing as fast as he can, fixing his mistakes along the way. If the credits are this good, what will the movie be like, I wonder.
Now I knew that Crowe was a rock critic writing for Rolling Stone in the 70s, before his FAST TIMES adventure. I didn’t read Rolling Stone then, other than the occasional Hunter S. Thompson article, but my older brothers sure did. The magazine stopped being cool because the music stopped being cool. But I knew Crowe was this teenage Rock n Roll savante, and that is ostensibly what ALMOST FAMOUS is about.
Crowe cast as his adolescent self the young Patrick Fugit, an unknown kid with a couple of episodes of TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL under his belt. He is Crowe as a decent, nerdy, talented boy (William), who is barely surviving his loving, overbearing mother. As the mom, Francis, um, I mean, Frances McDormand is unnerving and endearing at the same time. The boy’s loving but irritating big sister clashes with mom and takes off with a boyfriend to become a stewardess. In an effort to save him from mom’s influence, William’s sister leaves behind her record collection. William is an “un-cool” high school kid, isolated and in pain, father-less, sister-less… but Rock n Roll becomes his world and his salvation.
He is a talented writer, penning rock criticism for local papers. He is befriended by the burned-out editor of Creem Magazine, Lester Bangs, brilliantly played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Hoffman has been a ubiquitous presence in films since BOOGIE NIGHTS, and his dual/dueling Broadway performances in Sam Shepard’s TRUE WEST last year was an electrifying experience. Now he creates a curmudgeonly mentor for William, a sort of ghost of Christmas-yet-to-be, telling him “Rock is dead” and providing other such heartening insights, while also giving him a willing ear and an encouraging word. Though based on a real person, Hoffman’s Les Bangs is an original film creation… a Rock prophet-guru-nerd who, seeing his end in sight as he slouches toward Bethlehem, can’t help but try to pass the torch.
William is offered the chance to cover a touring band on the rise (“Stillwater”) for Rolling Stone by an unsuspecting editor that doesn’t know William is only 15. The kid travels with the band while his worried mother, who lets him go because she knows how much he needs this adventure yet afraid of losing her last child, screams “musicians have kidnapped my son!” Upon boarding the tour bus (bearing the sign “ALMOST FAMOUS”), young William/Cameron journeys like Dante into the inferno, chased by worried messages from his mother (“Don’t take drugs!”) and accompanied only by his yellow note pad, his long-distance calls to mentor Bangs, and the “Stillwater” family that teaches him about who he is and who he can become. Still waters run deep, indeed.
One of his Virgils is the band’s enigmatic guitarist, Russell, brought to vivid life in stage actor Billy Crudup’s breakthrough film performance as the Rock n Roll hero with feet of clay. The other is the siren Penny Lane, the beautiful free spirit who, as a “band-aid”, acts as both muse and sex toy for Crudup. She is an ephemeral but damaged girl, leading other girls into a romanticized life of low self-esteem and self-delusion, living in devotion to the music, or so they claim, and not just the musicians they service. Of course, Kate-Russell-William form an eternal triangle, resulting in pain and growth for all concerned. Kate Hudson’s Penny Lane is a magical character, and Hudson fills out her genes (Goldie Hawn is her mom) quite nicely. It’s a star-making debut performance.
There is a moment in the movie when everyone is on the bus, and it has been a long, bad night. Emotions are frayed. The mood is fragile. Elton John’s song “Tiny Dancer” is heard and, one at a time, everyone starts to sing along. Music heals. Families hurt each other, but they can heal, too. As in Crowe’s earlier films, music is the heart and soul of this film, both in the dramatic moments and concert scenes, dramatizing the effect on both the players and the audience as together they create, for a moment, a surrogate family for all who need one.
It seems at first a small story to build a movie on. Nothing blows up. The sex is mostly off-screen. Like all of Crowe’s other pictures, it’s a coming-of-age picture. But, when seen through the context of his career to date, you realize it’s about Crowe coming of age, as much as the characters in the film. Crowe is unlike his contemporaries, like writer-director Kevin Smith who tells us interesting things in a cinematically uninteresting way, or the Coen brothers, who say nearly nothing, but with a delightful visual style, or Spike Lee, who is wildly inconsistent and political rather than personal. Crowe is a both a writer and a filmmaker, and he makes movies about himself and about human relationships. Unlike film-school filmmakers, he doesn’t make films about films, but about life. And so, he tells stories about us. They are stories worth telling.
ALMOST FAMOUS made me reconsider the 70s (damn him!), and the person I was and am. That’s the power of a great storyteller and, make no mistake, Crowe is perhaps the foremost auteur of his generation.
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