Yes, the rock stars in Almost Famous are conceited, occasionally vengeful, and insufficiently attentive to the feelings of the female groupies in their midst. They are not, however, irredeemable. As William’s mother tells Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), the frontman of the fictitious band Stillwater that her son has drawn the assignment to cover: “There’s hope for you yet, Russell.” By the same token, the mother character, who might come across as a nag, harridan, or party-pooper in another movie, is genuinely empathetic. We feel her pain when she sits through her son’s graduation in his absence — he is in New York on the trail of Stillwater — and we feel her anger when she announces, with plaintive desperation, “Rock stars have kidnapped my son!” Not that we feel she is truly, or permanently, angry or desperate: Crowe loves to conjure a mood of joy or contentment threatened by, or perhaps ultimately enriched by, melancholy. He calls this “happy/sad.”

Seen a quarter-century after its release, Almost Famous startles with its careful articulation of this tone, which might seem superficial or sentimental but actually admits complexity. We see it when William’s recalcitrant older sister Anita (Zooey Deschanel) departs the family homestead and, to articulate her feelings, plays a record of Simon and Garfunkel’s “America.” The moment could be fatally cringey: the affectations of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a term cooked up by critic Nathan Rabin to describe the heroine in Crowe’s 2005 movie Elizabethtown. But the scene’s possible insufferableness is leavened by the shot, just moments later, showing Anita, suddenly anxious about leaving, craning her neck out of her departing car for one last look at Mom and Brother. We see it, too, in the remarkable moment in which groupie Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) intrudes on William’s notetaking by heaving her faux fur coat in his direction. Then, seated across from her, William presents himself as older than he is but, just as quickly, folds and admits the truth — one year at a time.

Crowe works to soften the hard edges of just about every character William encounters while he chronicles Stillwater for a story in Rolling Stone. Crowe does this not because he is a sentimentalist but because he still believes that people can have a positive influence on each other. When Russell is dressed down by William’s mother, he affects a respectful tone to a woman whom he clearly regards as an elder — “Your mom kind of freaked me out,” Russell, chastened, later tells William, in the sort of line only Crowe could write. When William recognizes how profoundly Penny has been manipulated by the rockers around whom she orbits, he intervenes in a manner that suggests someone of unusual maturity. Late in the film, recognizing that Penny has overdosed on Quaaludes, William arranges to have her stomach pumped — a life-saving act that also confirms William’s steadfast love for this wayward girl. And when Stillwater tries to torpedo William’s story, because of its unexpected truthfulness, Russell concedes that the kid writer had it right all along. In the end, Crowe rallies nearly everyone to William’s side.

Even in 2000, there were many who supposed that Crowe’s vision of protective parents and intimidating but kindly rockers was a combination of nostalgia and wish-fulfillment. Yet Crowe was to baby boomer moviemakers what, say, Sydney Sweeney is to Gen Z actresses: that rare pop culture figure who has made a virtue of peppiness. What’s more, it turns out that pretty much everything he put on screen in Almost Famous was not only inspired by real life, but very often, represented a transcription from real life. I lost count of the number of times in Crowe’s new memoir of his early years, The Uncool, in which dialogue first heard in Almost Famous was put in the mouths of real people who said much the same dialogue first. This includes the title of the book, which, as fans of the movie will recall, was uttered by rock journalist Lester Bangs, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. “You made friends with them,” Bangs counsels Crowe (and, in the movie, William) after a story is temporarily grounded at the behest of a band. “That was your mistake. They make you feel cool, and I met you. You are not cool.”

Crowe’s entire career, as journalist, filmmaker, and now memoirist, constitutes the best possible argument for studied uncoolness. Instead of coolness, Crowe has honed the qualities of modesty, self-deprecation, sincere hero worship (for bands and for mentors, such as Bangs), and intense affection for the people who formed him, especially his mother. His tone is highly lovable. At one point, he recounts accepting and quickly regretting a Rolling Stone assignment on the following topic: “how you learned about sex.” “Trying to write the article was like being lost in a room full of fun house mirrors, and I was a clown in every last one,” writes Crowe, who reckoned it was better to write an unpublishable piece about his mortifying would-be romances than to get out of the assignment altogether. To his shock, his editor loved it, saying, “The embarrassing stuff is always the best stuff.” Crowe writes, “The personal tone of that embarrassing article is now my favorite kind of writing. In fact, it’s the tone of this book.”

Crowe was born in Palm Springs, California, in 1957. His parents sound like unlikely candidates to have produced the grinning long-haired rock nerd pictured throughout the book. His father, James, was a U.S. Military Academy graduate who had a distinguished, albeit attenuated, career in the Army before moving on to various ventures in the private sector, including real estate. His mother, Alice, was a teacher of passionately liberal views — she warns of Nixon and John Birchers, and expresses admiration for Cesar Chavez — who holds very illiberal opinions about rock music. “She hated rock and roll,” Crowe writes. “It was all about brain cells. Rock was inelegant and, worse, obsessed with base issues like sex and drugs.” This was not a pose. When Crowe persuaded his mother to lend her ear to Paul Simon on The Smothers Brothers Show, she reacted with great indignation to the song he performed, “Mrs. Robinson.” “Eyebrows arching with false sincerity, Simon smirked through his then-controversial lyrics, ‘Coo coo ca-choo, Mrs. Robinsin / Jesus loves you more than you will know.’” Crowe writes. “With each mention of the word Jesus, Paul Simon’s mocking tone grew more lacerating. We shrunk into the sofa.” His sister Cindy, the basis for Almost Famous’s Anita, said, “Great idea. Now Mom’s going to get rock music banned from all of television too.” Crowe had another sister, Cathy, whose declining mental health and eventual suicide are written about with great candor and sensitivity.

Yet Crowe was not your typical teenage rebel. Even as he cottoned to rock music as his favored form of artistic expression, he respected his mother’s views and played along with her rules. He accepted that she would be his “date” at one of his first rock concerts, Elvis Presley at the San Diego Sports Arena, and, even better, was proud of her company amid the swath of “jolly blue-haired ladies” who had turned out to see the King. “My mom and I were clearly the coolest customers in sight,” he writes. More memorable was going to see Elton John in the company of Cindy, where the singer performed “a new song with a shimmering opening: ‘Tiny Dancer’” — a lifetime later, the veritable theme song of Almost Famous.

Crowe progressed from filing music reviews for the publication The Door, whose remuneration included free records, to bypassing a doorman named Scotty to interview Wild Turkey backstage at a concert, an episode also recreated in Almost Famous. “I immediately felt a part of the circus,” he writes. “Cases were rolling, camaraderie was everywhere, nobody (except Scotty) was excluding me.” He never presents himself as bigger than his subjects, whom he holds in reverence. Crowe sat across from Kris Kristofferson in the lobby of a bar he was too young to patronize while “knowing he’d soon want to bail to the more protective bar environment inside.” As it turned out, Kristofferson was among Crowe’s most gentlemanly interviewees. During a follow-up interview at the Continental Hyatt House, Kristofferson even made available to Crowe his own hotel room, which contained two beds — the second subsequently to be occupied by his Door editor, Bill Maguire, and his girlfriend. That night, as Crowe listened to the extracurricular activity going on in the adjacent bed, he remembers feeling sad.

“It was an elemental, human ache,” he writes. “I wasn’t sure why this feeling of existential dread also carried an intense feeling of . . . this is life. Sometimes the record, or the person, that pisses you off the most becomes your favorite, your best friend, your obsession. It was a strange itch of not belonging that my favorite music scratched. This was the world of the happy/sad.”

But not too sad. Crowe cheerfully charts the years that followed with extended cameos by the Eagles, Jim Croce, Emmylou Harris, and David Bowie. Before he acquired a driver’s license, he became accustomed to being dropped off at wherever he needed to be. He maintained a Day-Timer schedule book, a representative page from which is reproduced: “Led Zeppelin in Chicago;”; “Tentative Jimmy Page 4:00 P.M.”; “Call Roc Re: Garcia Interview”; “Dad Comes In.” He mollifies Mom by enrolling in classes at San Diego City College, even while he’s occupied with reporting on the touring Allman Brothers Band for Rolling Stone. “I agreed to getting homework in advance, nightly phone calls, and of course, ‘don’t do drugs,’” he writes. But he remained pure enough, despite his surroundings, to invite the wrath of Gregg Allman, who, alarmed by his age (16) at the time he was writing about him, demanded he relinquish his audiotapes of their interviews. “Sixteen! You’re underage,” Allman told Crowe. “How do I know you aren’t with the FBI? You’ve been talking to everybody.”

Throughout this book, Crowe emerges as the picture of constancy — a nice guy who finished first. An early encounter with moviemaking came when he was invited to appear as an extra on the final film of Orson Welles, The Other Side of the Wind. The location was the Bel Air mansion of hotshot filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, where Welles was then hanging his shingle. “Bogdanovich, wearing an ascot and a worried look, was usually in serious discussion with Welles, who roamed happily with a cigar and seemed unconcerned with directing the movie,” Crowe remembers. In fact, Bogdanovich’s masterpiece The Last Picture Show was a favorite of Kristofferson’s, who admired the film’s soundtrack. “The marriage of film and music,” Crowe writes, “would soon be my favorite part of writing and directing films.”

Not too many years later, finding his magazine pieces taking longer to complete, Crowe shifted gears. He recounts the writing of his book Fast Times at Ridgemont High, in which he exploited his youthful looks to immerse himself in a real high school, and the subsequent hit movie directed by Amy Heckerling. “Out of the ashes of a sputtering career as a music journalist came this new path as a screenwriter,” he writes. “It was the next frontier.” But this part of his life, the one we are most familiar with, is not covered in great detail. He glances at Almost Famous, a script he first thought too personal to be greenlit, but most of his subsequent efforts are skipped past, despite the real virtues of Elizabethtown, We Bought a Zoo (2011), and Aloha (2015). Like Say Anything and Almost Famous, these movies chart the fortunes of decent fellows who try to do their best and the appealing gals who support them. Their adventures are supplemented by soundtracks that lean heavily on Elton John, Cat Stevens, Tom Petty, and original music by Crowe’s ex-wife, Heart singer Nancy Wilson.

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But Crowe, we sense, is not avoiding talking about any of these hits or misses but instead foregrounding what really matters to him: his mother, whose cheerleading on behalf of his stage musical version of Almost Famous is described in this book, which also chronicles her declining health and death in 2019. “I still hear my mom’s voice all the time,” Crowe writes. “She’s still teaching. It’s in her voicemails and in the many notes and faxes and letters and emails. I kept everything.” He spread her ashes at the Broadway theater where the show was performed. “Alice Crowe is currently appearing in the curtains, among the seats, on the wooden planks onstage, and even on the roof, where she landed in big puffs across the marquee reading: Almost Famous: The Musical.”

Cameron Crowe has loomed in my consciousness for the better part of my life. When Almost Famous first came out, I was, to an almost comical degree, its ideal audience. I was two years older than the protagonist — I turned 17 in 2000 — but that was inconsequential because we shared so much else. Like William, my professional aspiration was to be a writer, and like William, I wanted to write about a world that seemed rather distant — in my case, the movies. Most of all, like William, I had a mother who was both encouraging of my talent and leery about where it might take me. I could picture her yelling, “Don’t take drugs!” though she didn’t have to — after all, I had been a member of Just Say No. The movie, which I saw six times on its initial release, suggested to me that it was possible to balance professional goals and private morality, big dreams and authentic virtue. The Uncool, an unusually fine and thoughtful showbiz memoir, tells me the same thing. Crowe loved good music — he loved his mother more.

Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.