Almost Famous

Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous is the sort of film about rock 'n' roll that you could safely take your mother to.
No four-letter words, hardly any drugs - a mild comic turn on acid by Billy Crudup, the lead guitarist of a group in the 1970s - and nice sex with a cute 15-year-old cub reporter for Rolling Stone (Patrick Fugit) losing his virginity in the sweetest possible way, to girls who treat him more like a mascot than a mate.
Forgive me if I don't share the excessive plaudits other critics have given this appealing, but rose-tinted chapter out of Crowe's own adolescence. There's no harm in it and quite a bit of amusement, the kind you generally get when an innocent boy gets mixed up in the world of cross-country gigs and riffs, groupies ironing the band's linen in return for bed room, and other usually grungy doings that go by the name of 'cool'.
And boy! does Fugit look innocent, with his big eyes, hampster cuddliness and bangs of hair that are invitations to the girls to push aside the better to kiss him goodnight.
Frances McDormand is the kid's mum, an academic, who sees him off 'on the road' and yells 'Don't take drugs'.
Her intellectual anxiety at entrusting her boy to guys who want to get their pictures on a T-shirt is heart-rending. And McDormand, the best player in the picture, keeps the domestic-maternal angle to the fore, which isn't often the case in rock 'n' roll road movies.
Philip Seymour Hoffman does a cameo as a rock critic and Fugit's mentor. Kate Hudson plays a 'band aide' groupie in eyelet-lace tank-tops with the biggest collection of hairpiece extensions ever seen on one head.
Considering the self-destructive tragedies in this profession, Almost Famous lets its gang down lightly, the worst moment involving a stomach pump, and the biggest disillusionment Fugit's discovery that a journalist can't afford to be a friend to those he's assigned to cover: it's sometimes necessary to be the enemy.
The best scene involves a mid-air crisis as the band is flying between gigs, which sends everyone into true-life confessions before they meet their maker, then into sulky shame at their self-exposure when the crash risk passes.
Though Rolling Stone's management shows implausible faith in entrusting its cover story to an untested 15-year-old, the magazine's endless fact-checking and mind-changing have the ring of journalistic truth: some of us have been there.