Writer and director Cameron Crowe's experiences as a teenage rock
journalist -- he was a regular contributor to Rolling Stone while still
in high school -- inspired this coming-of-age story about a 15-year-old
boy hitting the road with an up-and-coming rock band in the early 1970s.
Elaine Miller (Frances McDormand) is a bright, loving, but strict
single parent whose distrust of rock music and fears about drug use have
helped to drive a wedge between herself and her two children, Anita
(Zooey Deschanel) and William
(Patrick Fugit). Anita rebels by dropping out of school and becoming a
stewardess, but William makes something of his love of rock & roll
by writing album reviews for a local underground newspaper. William's
work attracts the attention of Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman),
editor of renegade rock magazine Creem, who takes William under his wing
and gives him his first professional writing assignment -- covering a
Black Sabbath concert. While William is unable to score an interview
with the headliners, the opening act, Stillwater, are more than happy to
chat with a reporter, even if he's still too young to drive, and
William's piece on the group in Creem gains him a new admirer in Ben
Fong-Torres (Terry Chen), an editor at Rolling Stone. Torres offers
William an assignment for a 3,000-word cover story on Stillwater, and
over the objections of his mother (whose parting words are "Don't use
drugs!"), and after some stern advice from Bangs (who says under no
circumstances should he become friends with a band he's covering),
Williams joins Stillwater on tour, where he becomes friendly with
guitarist Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup) and singer Jeff Bebe (Jason
Lee). William also becomes enamored of Penny Lane (Kate Hudson), a
groupie traveling with the band who is no older than William, but is
deeply involved with Russell. Lester Bangs and Ben Fong-Torres,
incidentally, were real-life rock writers Crowe worked with closely
during his days as a journalist. Almost Famous' original score was
composed by Nancy Wilson of Heart (who is also Crowe's wife).
Directed By: Cameron Crowe
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