Almost Famous

Herald rating: * * * *

Cast: Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Kate Hudson, Patrick Fugit, Anna Paquin, Philip Seymour Hoffman

Director: Cameron Crowe

Rating: M (drug use)

Running time: 128 mins

Screening: Village, Hoyts, Berkeley cinemas

Review: Russell Baillie

As a catch-cry "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll" still has a ring to it. Just the order is wrong.

As everyone who has been a teenage boy with a record collection knows, rock'n'roll came first. The rest sort of took care of itself. Eventually.

Director Cameron Crowe knows this, as does his autobiographical movie Almost Famous. As a teenager in the early 70s, the gifted director of Say Anything, Singles and the fabulous Jerry Maguire, got himself a job as a scribe for the then counter-culture Rolling Stone.

Now, in an age where his old publication puts teenagers only on the cover, not the staff, Crowe has chosen to revisit his pubescent glory days.

The result is a finely detailed, gently humorous, sentimental memoir, possessed of a fine ensemble cast whose own profiles match the title.

It's also a fine rock'n'roll movie capturing the era of the likes of Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers and Grand Funk Railroad to a flared trouser-legged tee.

The fictitious band at the film's centre, Stillwater, could have been a contender in the same league.

Crowe's wide-eyed but gifted alter ego William Miller (Fugit) lands the job of doing an on-the-road feature on the up-and-coming band. That's despite the concerns of his mother (McDormand, who is hilarious and terrific), who can't see what her dutiful son sees in that racket, and rock writing mentor Lester Bangs (Seymour, ditto), who warns his student that acceptance of a backstage pass is fraught with journalistic compromise.

But along the way young William's adventure turns into both a sweet unrequited love story with groupie, sorry, "band aid," Penny Lane (Hudson, heartbreaking and luminous) and a portrait of a rock-entourage-as-family, with the youngster the newly adopted kid brother.

That makes Stillwater lead guitarist Russell Hammond (Crudup) the big brother.

The reluctant interviewee has the monopoly on the band's charisma levels, though his rock star cool memorably falters during one acid-inspired awol episode, and he withers under a long-distance tongue-lashing from William's mother.

The film contains scenes that variously drip with a mix of affection and naked nostalgia for the times, alongside ones that are all too believable in a Spinal Tap kind of way.

Almost Famous is a little unsatisfyingly soft around the edges considering the milieu, but it has a double album's worth of memorable and utterly convincing characters to compensate.

It also shows why some rock'n'roll fans pick up notebooks rather than guitars, and leave the sex and drugs to those far better qualified.