For Fans of Stephen Herek

Richard Dreyfuss gives one of the performances of his career, and the film earns its emotional payoff across thirty years of screen time without feeling rushed or manipulative. What makes it stick is the refusal to sentimentalize failure: Holland surrenders his real ambitions, and the movie takes that loss seriously. The film does not pretend that a life of teaching is the same as a life of creating, only that it might matter just as much. The final scene, with the auditorium full of former students, is one of the genuinely great endings in 1990s Hollywood mainstream cinema.

It arrived in 2001 between Almost Famous and the post-9/11 box office collapse and vanished almost immediately. That is a shame, because the film is genuinely sharp about the gap between the fantasy of rock stardom and its reality: the loneliness, the loss of identity, the way success can hollow out the very thing you loved. Mark Wahlberg is better than his reputation here, and the music sequences have real energy. It belongs on the same shelf as Almost Famous and it almost certainly never will be, which is part of what makes it interesting.

It is the film that concentrates everything he does well: effortless warmth, physical comedy that does not mock its characters, and a genuine sweetness underneath the goofiness. The premise sounds stupid on paper and the film knows it, but it plays the characters completely straight, which is exactly why it works. It also launched Keanu Reeves, which counts for something.