Almost Famous (2000)

Directed by Cameron Crowe. With Billy Crudup, Patrick Fugit, Kate Hudson, Frances McDormand. A high-school boy is given the chance to write a story for Rolling Stone Magazine about an up-and-coming rock band as he accompanies them on their concert tour.

Almost Famous is a 2000 American comedy-drama film written and directed by Cameron Crowe and starring Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Kate Hudson, and Patrick Fugit.

Writer and director Cameron Crowe's experiences as a teenage rock journalist -- he was a regular contributor to Rolling Stone while still in high school -- inspired this coming-of-age story about a 15-year-old boy hitting the road with an up-and-coming rock band in the early 1970s. Elaine Miller (Frances McDormand) is a bright, loving, but strict single parent whose distrust of rock music and fears about drug use have helped to drive a wedge between herself and her two children, Anita (Zooey Deschanel) and William (Patrick Fugit). Anita rebels by dropping out of school and becoming a stewardess, but William makes something of his love of rock & roll by writing album reviews for a local underground newspaper. William's work attracts the attention of Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman), editor of renegade rock magazine Creem, who takes William under his wing and gives him his first professional writing assignment -- covering a Black Sabbath concert. While William is unable to score an interview with the headliners, the opening act, Stillwater, are more than happy to chat with a reporter, even if he's still too young to drive, and William's piece on the group in Creem gains him a new admirer in Ben Fong-Torres (Terry Chen), an editor at Rolling Stone. Torres offers William an assignment for a 3,000-word cover story on Stillwater, and over the objections of his mother (whose parting words are

Oh, what a lovely film. I was almost hugging myself while I watched it. "Almost Famous" is funny and touching in so many different ways. It's the story of a 15-year-old kid, smart and terrifyingly earnest, who through luck and pluck gets assigned by Rolling Stone magazine to do a profile of a rising rock band. The magazine has no idea he's 15. Clutching his pencil and his notebook like talismans, phoning a veteran critic for advice, he plunges into the experience that will make and shape him. It's as if Huckleberry Finn came back to life in the 1970s, and instead of taking a raft down the Mississippi, got on the bus with the band.

Amazon.com: Almost Famous: Billy Crudup, Patrick Fugit, Kate Hudson, Frances McDormand, Jason Lee, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Zooey Deschanel, Michael Angarano, Anna Paquin, Fairuza Balk, Noah Taylor, John Fedevich, Cameron Crowe, Ian Bryce, Jerry Ziesmer, Lisa Stewart, Marty P. Ewing, Scott M. Martin: Movies & TV

Overview of Almost Famous, 2000, directed by Cameron Crowe, with Billy Crudup, Frances McDormand, Kate Hudson, at Turner Classic Movies

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In 1973, 15-year-old William Miller's unabashed love of music and aspiration to become a rock journalist lands him an assignment from Rolling Stone magazine to interview and tour with the up-and-coming band Stillwater—fronted by lead guitar Russell Hammond, and lead singer Jeff Bebe William. A semi-autobiographical film based on director Cameron Crowe's time as a teenage writer for Rolling Stone.