Almost Famous (2000)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on May 2, 2025

The girl I had a crush on for most of high school was into music.

Everything she said left me spellbound, but her affection for music awed me. The bands, songs, albums, and venues changed every day, but she spoke about it as an astrophysicist does the universe. Music was everywhere. Music was everything.

And I never understood it. We were staring at the same Red Delicious, but I saw an apple and she saw divinity. For that reason—as well as her more than passing resemblance to Kate Hudson—I’ve always watched Almost Famous with a detective’s eye. I watch it every year and remember both her and that chasm between our respective hearts while listening to music (music).

William (Patrick Fugit) is the brilliant but sheltered son of a college professor (Frances McDormand). His hobby of writing about music gets him an assignment from Rolling Stone magazine: write 4000 words about Stillwater, an emerging rock band led by the golden Russell (Billy Crudup) and the jealous Jeff (Jason Lee). This task sends naive William on the road, where he documents the band while discovering himself and falling in love with Stillwater’s persistent fan Penny Lane (Kate Hudson).

All these years later, Almost Famous remains my Rosetta Stone for music. In the beginning, that perspective endeared Cameron Crowe’s film to me. The open road, the wild parties, the endless charisma of a young Crudup—these were my hints, my ciphers, my decoder rings to this other state of being. If you watch Almost Famous as a story about music, there’s reward; it makes me believe that art, emotion, and rhythm form the fabric of existence. Watching now in 2025, I’ve been to concerts big and small; I’ve felt favorite songs vibrating through my ribcage from the front row and joined 70,000+ in performing the chorus for my favorite singer. If ever I could extract some of what she felt in music, now would be the time.

But I’m also older now, and watching again, I marvel at how young Hudson, Fugit, and Crudup look. Instead of feeling this time-displaced wonder, I watch three characters grapple with growing up. I once watched Russell as the “golden god” he declares himself to be, but now I see a man at a crossroads with gray threatening his temples; he’s ready to rise, but also terrified. William and Penny also straddle a critical line: they are children in a mature world, play-acting as theoretical adults extrapolated from still-developing selves. There are no deities here, only flawed, flailing people hoping the wave of music carries them to shore. That sex-drug-rock n’ roll lifestyle they encounter doesn’t appeal to me now anymore than it did while I stared doe-eyed at my crush, but that moment when anything and everything seemed possible? That still does.

Almost Famous is a frolicking coming-of-age film about music. It follows an exciting journey, it features a fantastic cast, and it fictionalizes a world I’ll never know with such vivid realism that it feels almost like I do. It’s a blast. But it’s something greater, too: we all bring something to Almost Famous separate from the film itself, tapping into the last dwindling traces of our dust-coated almosts and long-retired dreams.

That’s almost certainly not what my high school crush meant when her eyes lit up talking about music like it was everything. Or maybe, in some way, it was? Perhaps she already understood that it’s a blessing to think a noun in italics like she did music.

Or to watch a film that convinces you that you do, too.