We’re going to start this off with a little mental exercise. Think back to the first time you felt cool. When I say cool, I don’t mean the mass-produced coolness that gets sold back to everyone in an attempt to sell you the next hot product. I mean the real feeling, the one you get when you sneak into your first “grown up” concert or when you and your friends decide to raid your older sibling’s room for all of the goodies that felt forbidden to you then, even if they seem like such mundane paraphernalia now that you’re older. Got that image in your mind? Good. Keep it there until it feels like it is going to spill out the side of your skull. With this exercise, you would think that I am preparing to tell you all about a movie that places weight on that inherent coolness. In that sense, you could also think I stand at 6 feet tall and have shiny white teeth. But I’m a short angry man with teeth the color of lemons here to let you know that we're talking about being uncool. We’re talking about Almost Famous, the 2000s film directed by Cameron Crowe about a 16-year-old baby faced William Miller coming of age while in the midst of following blooming band Stillwater in the rocking 70s, getting the once in a lifetime chance to write for Rolling Stone Magazine.
Before we digress into that, however, a quick little note. This is the first part in a weekly series covering the favorite music centric movies of the writer, yours truly, and the things we can at least try to glean from any of them. Next week's diatribe will be on the 90s cult classic Empire Records. When it comes to this piece though, at least half of this will be incoherent. A quarter of it will be downright idiotic. Who knows what the last quarter of this will be, but somewhere in there is some kernel of truth I’m trying to pop. Now that I have finished my expository drivel, let's get onto the rest of the show.
At the risk of sounding like a regurgitator of cliches, we’ll start at the very beginning of the flick and go by general story beats until we reach the inevitable title crawl that everyone is forced to face at the end of every film. We greet our young protagonist when he’s somehow found a way to be even younger. Even from the start, that feeling of inherent “uncoolness” is already present. William is two years younger than everyone else in his grade and feels like a loser because of it. He does have one bastion of hope however, which is the sweet tunes of rock and roll, birthed out of the bequeathed records from his sister who fled their overbearing mother to become a stewardess. He lights a candle as he sits to listen to The Who’s “Tommy”, practically under a spell as the riffs of Pete Townshend’s guitar entrance him. As he gains a couple years of age and a couple hairs on his face, he soon finds friendship in aging rock critic Lester Bangs, a real rock critic from that era that would’ve been in the same retirement home as Gordon Gee in this day and age if he wasn’t buried 6 feet under since the 80s. He saw some of his work, becoming partially impressed by some of his writing, and gave him the task of writing about a black sabbath concert. However, he does have some wisdom to impart to young William. He must be honest and unmerciful, lest he let rock become an industry of cool. In the eyes of Lester, when rockstars ignore their own inherent stupidity, it only furthers the commercialization of the scene. Mercy is no longer an option. Yet it was time for William to finally go see that concert and do his write-up.
The press of the buzzer on the door.
He waits and he waits.
He’s not on the list.
The door shuts.
A series of events that would amount to the equivalent of a “that sounded better in my head” joke if this were a movie made 20 years later.
However, it’s when he’s outside that door, racking his head for some way to get in, he comes across the two groups of people that will change his life in some way that meanders on the spectrum that is positive and negative change. The first is the free-spirited and mysterious Penny Lane and her group of Band Aids, a flock of ladies who scoff at the idea of being groupies, believing that they support these musicians not because of love for particular people, but for the music. Is there even really a difference? I want to think so, but maybe that just makes me a groupie. We’ll get back to Penny later, since there’s still that second group that must show its face: Stillwater. For all intents and purposes, this rock band could be a stand in for any band of its era. Big aspirations matched with the equally titanic egos of its members. While each member of the band serves his purpose in this story, there is only one who embodies the theme of this movie the most: Russell, the guitarist. Everything about him, from his attire to the way he flirts and woos miss Penny Lane, embodies a certain idea of cool. A rockstar must be cool after all, lest they become someone who would write articles about movies they’ve rewatched multiple times in one week. It’s because of this energy that William becomes absolutely entranced by Russell and Stillwater. If I was a movie reviewer, I would then proceed to follow this movie scene by scene, explaining the big points of each clip of the movie. Unfortunately, my expertise lies only in music and the preaching of ideas that sound redundant by the time they come out. If you want to know the specifics, raid the hollowed out remains of a blockbuster or pull your TV remote out from the cushions and see the movie for yourself. We’ll only be touching on the big ideas for this lecture.
Let us finally circle back around to Penny Lane. Everything about her demeanor oozes out the visage of a musical muse, from her cryptic hints about her life outside of the music scene to her flirtatious interactions with the idea of music itself. She is the worm that lures starry eyed William to make half of the stupid decisions that he ends up making. She just seems so cool to him that every time he doesn’t follow in her footsteps, he feels like an utter buffoon. Yet there is a side to Penny that even William doesn’t get until much later on. She feels broken. The cool aspect of her façade is not an affectation as much as it is a way of guarding herself from all of the pain, she knows she’ll have to experience it eventually. If she stops for a second, letting the veil drop, she wouldn’t be ready to cope with just how hurt she feels by everything. So, until then, she must be carefree and fun. That’s what’s cool right? That brings us to the man she spends the most time with: Time for us to talk about Russell. First meeting him in the movie, it seems like nothing can shake his cool demeanor and the confident energy he has whenever he is with the band. The music frees him. It allows him to be this impenetrable god. He even says so after a certain point, proclaiming himself to be a “golden god” at a party, albeit due to the presence of certain substances. But when the music stops and he has to sit with himself, that’s when the cracks make themselves known like the acne of the greasiest faced teenager you know right before picture day. This image, this coolness, he has built up over the years is poisoning him from the inside out. His relationship with his bandmates is deteriorating because he believes his persona makes him more valuable than his bandmates. They’re steppingstones for him on his path rock and roll godhood. He’s the big man, they’re the ones that get left in the dust. If it’s an industry of cool, he must have the monopoly
This railroad will make its final stop right where it started, right back at baby faced William. After seeing Stillwater doing their performance and Rolling Stone liking his article on the aforementioned concert, he is off on the road with Stillwater. They believe that he is going to write a piece on their ingenuity, ready to inflate their stardom like an anticipated ballon animal at a birthday party. However, the words of Lester bounce around in his head. Honest and unmerciful. But even when he’s trying to be honest, he can’t help but be sucked in. Music, the thing that has always seemed like some cool forbidden fruit, and the people who make it now calling out to him and wanting his presence. He follows the band, forgoing his own graduation ceremony just to make the time last for just a little bit longer. As long as he is around them, he feels a little bit cool. He doesn’t have any friends back home, so this is all he has. He bares himself to this world and to Penny. He sees it all through thick and thin, through near death experiences and personal cataclysms. And then, when it comes time for the piece William has been preparing all this time to be checked and then sent out into the world, what does Stillwater do? Do they congratulate him for his article and thank him for what they wrote? Do they acknowledge what he did? What they do is fully deny the events that he wrote about, their own internal reasoning that it makes them look uncool. It makes them sound like fools and, most importantly, it shatters what they stand for. William is left dejected, all his hard work for nothing. It isn’t until clever planning from Penny that Russel finally sees William for everything that he is. The entire time, he referred to him as “the Enemy”. It wasn’t until the music stopped playing and he looked around and at himself that he finally figured out what was wrong. He retracts his statement, and the article gets published. After all of this, it may lead you to ask what this was all for? What sort of theme is one supposed to get out of this. Funnily enough, the answer you’re looking is in something Lester Bangs tells William as soon as everything feels lost and William Miller feels like a loser once more: “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool."