The 44th Regus London Film Festival is beginning, or so we were hoping, with stirring power chords, a chest-busting bass line and some big retro-adolescent laughs. The opening film is Cameron Crowe's avowedly semi-autobiographical project about William, a cutely innocent 15-year-old boy in 1973 who flukes his way into going on the road with a rock band and writing about it for Rolling Stone magazine.
The imaginary band, Stillwater (a name calculated to evoke half-remembered echoes of real life titans of old), has a charismatic lead guitarist, Russell (Billy Crudup), who takes William under his wing. Then there is the rock journalist Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who in his dishevelled big-brotherish way has kind of taken young William under his wing as well.
All of which infuriates William's protective mother, Frances McDormand, who considers that William's place is under her wing. And so it is we are invited to believe that the moral centre of this intensely conservative film is the importance, and the place of, family .
This is a very sentimental, low-cal, and oddly humourless account of life on the road with a heavy rock band in the seventies. Forget what you've read by Hunter S Thompson, PJ O'Rourke or indeed Lester Bangs; rock'n'roll is about as decadent as Martha Stewart with all the raunch of an episode of Sesame Street.
Sex? We know the legends about jail-bait groupies and mass debauch sessions indulged in by those mega-rock egotists for whom feminism was just a rumour. Almost Famous coyly brushes that stuff under the carpet and primly distinguishes between slut groupies and "band-aids" - nice girls who follow the guys around like muses. Sweet hippie rock chick Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) is one such, on whom William naturally nurses a crush.
Drugs? No nasty jacking up. Russell has a U certificate acid trip ending with throwing himself into a swimming pool fully clothed. Freaky.
Rock'n'roll? Stillwater's music is so dull it had me yearning for the thrills of Wishbone Ash. There are "band has bad gig" scenes and "band has row" scenes which seem lifted straight from Spinal Tap, but not nearly as plausible or as well acted. And as William, young Patrick Fugit has a pudgy little embryo Tobey Maguire face with that certain sort of perky gormlessness that makes you want to slap him. Almost Famous sucks the energy and danger out of both the music and the journalism of the time, turning it into a nostalgic family-oriented theme park ride.
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