Film: Two Roads to Nowhere

SOME films are just good enough for you to have wished them a bit better. They are a little too sentimental, soft, and mildly dishonest to be much more than a slightly melancholy missed opportunity. Such a one is Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, a quasi-autobiographical memory film about the writer-director at age 15, when he managed to garner a journalistic assignment to cover a mid-level rock band’s breakthrough national tour.

Two things need be stated forthwith. First, the only truly good thing I can say for rock ‘n’ roll is that it isn’t rap. Crowe, however, seemingly still a happy adolescent at 43, clearly grooves on rock now as then. Second, 45 minutes have been cut to bring the film down to two hours, although Crowe (most famously the man behind Jerry Maguire) promises the uncut version on DVD next year. If, as I hear, the cuts were mostly concert sequences, so much the better; but if the cuts affected the now rather choppy and elliptic last part of the story, restoration may prove redemption, making judgment of the present version precarious.

JS

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John Simon

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SOME films are just good enough for you to have wished them a bit better. They are a little too sentimental, soft, and mildly dishonest to be much more than a slightly melancholy missed opportunity. Such a one is Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, a quasi-autobiographical memory film about the writer-director at age 15, when he managed to garner a journalistic assignment to cover a mid-level rock band’s breakthrough national tour.

Two things need be stated forthwith. First, the only truly good thing I can say for rock ‘n’ roll is that it isn’t rap. Crowe, however, seemingly still a happy adolescent at 43, clearly grooves on rock now as then. Second, 45 minutes have been cut to bring the film down to two hours, although Crowe (most famously the man behind Jerry Maguire) promises the uncut version on DVD next year. If, as I hear, the cuts were mostly concert sequences, so much the better; but if the cuts affected the now rather choppy and elliptic last part of the story, restoration may prove redemption, making judgment of the present version precarious.