For Fans of Almost Famous

When the cast of Stillwater spontaneously sings Elton John's 'Tiny Dancer' somewhere in the American Southwest, Cameron Crowe does not play it for irony or nostalgia. He plays it straight. The song does what the whole film argues: it turns strangers into something briefly close to family, then the moment is over and the bus keeps moving. Very few scenes in popular cinema trust a pop song that completely.

William Miller is the narrator, but Kate Hudson's Penny Lane carries the film's argument. She has constructed an entire identity around being adjacent to greatness, and the film is honest enough to show both how beautiful and how precarious that position is. Her arc, from the fur-coat confidence of the opening tour sequence to the airport scene, is the emotional spine. Crowe lets her be complicated without punishing her for it.

Almost Famous is partly a love letter to a specific kind of writing: long-form music criticism in the tradition of Lester Bangs, written by someone who actually cared whether words did justice to sound. Crowe based William on his own teenage years at Rolling Stone. The film argues that getting too close to your subject is both the cardinal sin of journalism and the only way to write something true. That tension has not aged.