Jeremy’s Tophunder №26: Almost Famous

Jeremy Conlin

6 min readApr 27, 2020

I’m flying high over Tupelo, Mississippi with America’s hottest band, and we’re all about to die.

You’ll meet them all again on the long journey to the middle.

Here I am, telling secrets to the one guy you don’t tell secrets to.

One day, you’ll be cool. Look under your bed. It will set you free.

Look at this — an entire generation of Cinderellas, and there’s no glass slipper.

Rock stars have kidnapped my son.

If you break his spirit, harm him in any way, keep him from his chosen profession, which is law — something you may not value, but I do — you will meet the voice on the other end of this telephone and it will not be pretty. Do we understand each other?

They made you feel cool. And hey, I met you. You are not cool.

The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.

I am a Golden God!

And you can tell Rolling Stone magazine that my last words were: I’m on drugs!

Friendship is the booze they feed you. They want you to get drunk on feeling like you belong.

I always tell the girls never take it seriously. If you never take it seriously, you never get hurt. If you never get hurt, you always have fun. And if you ever get lonely, you can just go to the record store and visit your friends.

If you think Mick Jagger will be out there trying to be a rock star at age 50, you are sadly, sadly mistaken.

I didn’t invent the rainy day, man. I just own the best umbrella.

I once hit a man in Dearborn, Michigan. A hit and run. I hit him and just kept on going. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead… but I’m sorry. Not a day goes by I don’t see his face.

It’s all happening.

For whatever reason, I don’t think about Almost Famous as a particularly quotable movie, but somehow, every time I watch it, I find myself absolutely loving some of the lines, and wondering why I don’t use them more in my everyday speech.

Every time I watch it, I think I’ll like it less than I remember it, but somehow, I always like it more than I remember it. In the early drafts of this list, I had it pretty low (and a few even left it off), but as I kept revising, I kept remembering how much I love the movie for reasons that I’ve never fully thought about.

I normally don’t like Cameron Crowe movies. I don’t particularly care for Jerry Maguire or Vanilla Sky, I’ve never seen Say Anything or Singles (but can’t imagine I’d like them very much), and We Bought A Zoo and Aloha were both incredibly disappointing despite both featuring casts I would normally like. The only movies of his that I’ve enjoyed are Almost Famous (which I love) and Pearl Jam Twenty (which I also loved). So maybe I only like Crowe when he takes a deep dive into the world of rock journalism. Who knows.

One of the reasons I love Almost Famous is because it got some amazing performances out of actors that I’ve always felt were under-appreciated. Billy Crudup is one of the more underrated actors of the past 20 years, and he’s pretty great here. I’ve always liked Jason Lee and never understood why he wasn’t a bigger star, and he’s great here also. Frances McDormand has won two Oscars and an Emmy but somehow still seems to get left out of the “best current female actor” conversation. Anna Paquin, Zooey Deschanel, and Jimmy Fallon are all great in small roles, and I absolutely love Jay Baruchel as the way-too-excited Led Zeppelin fan.

My two favorite performances in the movie, though, are Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs (no surprise, he’s the most versatile actor of his generation), and, in a shocking twist, Kate Hudson. I think Hudson is tremendous in the movie, and 20 years later, I still can’t totally figure out if it was just a perfect marriage of actor and role, and there was no way she could screw it up, or if she’s secretly the most underrated actor in Hollywood but just can’t be bothered to make anything but dumpster-quality romantic comedies. I genuinely don’t know.

Crowe’s partially autobiographical script is what really makes the movie for me, though. The world of 1970s rock and roll that the movie establishes just feels so authentic and so real. It’s often portrayed as a world of debauchery and excessive partying. And sure, there’s some of that in the movie, but for the most part, the focus really seems to be on the music, and the sense of belonging that William finds among the musicians and their fans. At its core, the movie is a love letter to music from the era, not unlike Dazed and Confused, which I wrote about a few days ago.

I want to mention two scenes here — the first is when Penny Lane (Hudson) asks William if he wants to go to Morocco with her, and the second is when Zooey Deschanel finally returns home after being away for several years (it’s about the last minute of that YouTube clip). The reason I like these two scenes is because both were screw-ups that ended up in the movie because they looked good anyway.

In the Morocco scene, when William tells Penny Lane to ask him again, that’s not William telling Penny. That’s actor Patrick Fugit telling actor Kate Hudson to ask him again, because he wasn’t happy with his line reading the first time around. It’s a wonderfully adorable moment that Cameron Crowe liked enough to just put into the movie anyway.

In Zooey Deschanel’s return, I think something similar happens. As Zooey and McDormand embrace, McDormand says “I forgive you.” Deschanel pauses, and then says, “I didn’t apologize,” but the way she says it sounds to me like she’s realizing she forgot her line and McDormand just went ahead without her. Both actors almost immediately start laughing, which sells me on the theory even more.

The first anecdote I know for a fact — Cameron Crowe has confirmed that it happened that way. I don’t know for sure on the second one, but after watching the clip a few dozen times, it certainly feels that way to me. It’s these small moments of charm that really remind me how much I love the movie. It’s a personal story, and it’s a little rough around the edges, not an auteur’s vision of a perfect film. It’s imperfections are what make it better than what any other director could have done with the script.

Almost Famous is a movie that just makes me feel a certain way, and I can’t totally describe it. Like Dazed and Confused, the music transports me to an era that must have been exhilarating — when the musical artists that I consider my favorites were actively making music on an ongoing basis. And it’s not just being alive then, but very specifically, it’s being -young- then. Music means more to you at that age. It just does. And someone like William, who was two years younger than everyone in his class (and unpopular because of it) suddenly finding a home in that world is an incredible feel-good story.

Sometimes I want to not like Almost Famous so much — it’s a cheesy movie with several scenes that layer on the saccharine feeling pretty thick. But as I watch it, I just can’t help myself. It’s a fun movie that makes me feel good and reminds me of a bunch of music I love. I probably love it even more than I’m willing to admit, but landing it at №26 seems fair.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One