Film: Two Roads to Nowhere.

Some films are just good enough for you to have wished them a bit better. They are a little too sentimental, soft, and mildly dishonest to be much more than a slightly melancholy missed opportunity. Such a one is Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous, a quasi-autobiographical memory film about the writer-director at age 15, when he managed to garner a journalistic assignment to cover a mid-level rock band's breakthrough national tour.

Two things need be stated forthwith. First, the only truly good thing I can say for rock 'n' roll is that it isn't rap. Crowe, however, seemingly still a happy adolescent at 43, clearly grooves on rock now as then. Second, 45 minutes have been cut to bring the film down to two hours, although Crowe (most famously the man behind Jerry Maguire) promises the uncut version on DVD next year. If, as I hear, the cuts were mostly concert sequences, so much the better; but if the cuts affected the now rather choppy and elliptic last part of the story, restoration may prove redemption, making judgment of the present version precarious.

But judge I will, anyway. Almost Famous is a watchable movie, no more, no less. Well, one thing about it is hard to watch: the leading actress, Kate Hudson, who is currently being hyped into celebrity, even though her one (dubious) strong suit is being Goldie Hawn's daughter. For the rest, she is neither especially talented nor much to look at, which to be sure, hasn't stopped many another from making it. Here she plays Penny Lane, the leader of a gaggle of groupies known as the Band-Aids. But of the groupies, Anna Paquin, of whom we see very little, is more gifted, and Fairuza Balk, of whom I'd be happy to see less, is at least sexy in a low-down, dirty way.

Young William Miller (Crowe's alter ego, played by first-timer Patrick Fugit) inherits the rock records of his rebel sister (the good Zooey Deschanel), who runs away from their college-professor single mother, the moralistic Elaine. By age 15, William, despite Elaine's sneering at rock and steering him toward literature, is an avid rock fan, and extorts permission from her to leave school and their San Diego home to follow the band Stillwater on assignment from the magazine Rolling Stone.

He gets especially close to the lead guitarist, Russell (Billy Crudup), who is locked in a progressively less friendly rivalry with the lead singer, Jeff (Jason Lee). Russell, with his Christ-like look and laid-back manner, is more charismatic than the nervous and explosive Jeff. Problems and more problems ensue when Penny, Russell's devoted groupie, on whom William has a crush, is literally gambled away by Russell, who, anyway, has a jealous woman back home. Then there are Penny's three fellow Band-Aids, who eventually get around to deflowering William in a scene so discreet and foreshortened as to be more like a quadrille than a seduction. There are scenes involving drugs, more comical than serious, and there is a near-suicide aborted in the nick of time. But all this is slick, toothless, wrapped in the cotton wool of nostalgia, except for some funny phone conversations between William and Elaine and one uproarious sequence on a dangerously storm-tossed plane. Oral sex gets a fleeting mention, but, as the New York Times's reviewer put it, this is "a movie about sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll that you would be happy to take your mother to see." Granted, there are mothers and there are mothers; still, this intended compliment strikes me as a cop-out for both reviewer and filmmaker. William's big dilemma is whether to tell the truth about the tour and alienate the band, or write a puff piece, and have Rolling Stone reject it. The youth opts for the former, but is forgiven by the band, whose reputation soars because of the article; Crowe makes the opposite choice with his movie and, whatever success it may reap, loses me.

Billy Crudup and Jason Lee do nicely by their underdeveloped characters; Frances McDormand makes Elaine a genuine eccentric; and Philip Seymour Hoffman, as the real-life disenchanted rock maven Lester Bangs, who becomes William's minatory but unheeded mentor about the untrustworthiness of rockers, is splendidly sour. As William, Patrick Fugit (a relative of Tempus?) makes a highly promising screen debut. John Toll has photographed with his customary controlled lushness, and mid-'70s rock is, I'm told, well represented on the soundtrack. But, oh, that Kate Hudson; where was Chloe Sevigny when we needed her?

--Neil LaBute, whose reputation was made writing and directing sordid dramamas where nastiness is not just revealed but actually reveled in, has merely directed Nurse Betty from a screenplay by others: the short-story writer John C. Richards and the movie-music editor, James Flamberg, the marriage of short-breathed fiction and soundtrack manipulation.

Betty Sizemore (Renee Zellweger), a young Kansas wife with some background in nursing, works as a counter girl in a diner. Unhappily married to the brutish used-car dealer (and secret dope peddler) Del (Aaron Eckhart), she finds bliss in watching her favorite soap opera, A Reason to Love, starring the cute George McCord as Dr. David Ravell (Greg Kinnear). Betty is in love, though it is unclear whether with George or David.

One night, immersed in her beloved TV show, she is unaware that two black men, whom she previously served at her counter, are making some kind of deal with Del in the next room. Though posing variously as cops or insurance-company investigators, Charlie (Morgan Freeman), the laid-back elder, and Wesley (Chris Rock), the loose-cannon younger, are in fact enforcers for a drug cartel. When Del is not forthcoming about where his doubly ill-gotten drug stash is hidden, the overeager Wesley scalps him, and the more tenderhearted Charlie shoots him to put him out of his misery.

Betty accidentally glimpses the murder, which induces dissociative trauma (in the old movies, it would have been amnesia), imagines that she was once engaged to Dr. Ravell, and sets out in Del's LeSabre (which, unbeknown to her, contains his stash) to find him in Los Angeles. Along the way, she makes a phone call to a girl chum back in Kansas, which sets the killers, now aware that she was a witness and armed with a snapshot of her, in hot pursuit. It transpires that a half-baked Kansas reporter and the bumbling Kansas sheriff are, in turn, pursuing the pursuers. There is effective crosscutting as Betty miraculously gets a nursing job in L.A., moves in with a comic but canny Chicano chick, while the hitmen painstakingly trail her.

George and the soap-opera staff mistake Betty for a would-be actress going to fantastic lengths to snag a role on the show; when she finally is given a small stint before the cameras, she slowly and shatteringly awakens to reality with bittersweet results. The scene where the truth dawns on her, though stretched almost beyond endurance, is acted by Miss Zellweger with such stunned intensity, such centripetal turmoil, as to constitute one of the great scenes in contemporary cinema.

Even though any soap-opera actor can tell you from his fan mail that the country is full of people who cannot distinguish between television and reality, such persons are seldom heroines of movies, made out to be smart under their dumbness. Equally problematic is that no one catches on to Betty's delusion until very late in the game. And do hardened criminals like Charlie fall in love with their designated victims on the strength of a few snapshots? This short list by no means exhausts Nurse Betty's absurdities, yet in the current dearth of decent American films, even this questionable item, sensitively shot by Jean Yves Escoffier, goes down almost as smoothly as a dish prepared by the cinematographer's illustrious culinary namesake.