SEX, DRUGS & MOM : 'Almost Famous'.

Almost Famous is writer/director Cameron Crowe's warmly personal look back at a boy caught between rock and a hard Mom. Set in San Diego in 1973, the film follows a fifteen-year-old named William (Patrick Fugit), a bright kid with a passion for Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. Frances McDormand (Fargo) plays William's embattled but spirited mother, Elaine, a Shakespeare-quoting professor whose idea of family fun is sitting around discussing To Kill a Mockingbird, and who rails against "the poetry of drugs and promiscuous sex." William's older sister, meanwhile, schools him in rock-as-revelation--listen to The Who's Tommy with a candle burning, she says, and he'll see his whole future. Of course, Mom has a vision of his future as well; she's thinking law school.

As things turn out, William's future is now. Writing about music for his school paper, he sends some clips to famed rock critic and Creem magazine editor Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman, again showing why he's the best younger actor onscreen today). Bangs gives him a few assignments, and soon Rolling Stone is calling to ask whether William is available to do a piece--unaware he's just a kid, and has to sell the idea to his mother first. Elaine panics, but hey, what's an achievement-oriented single mom to do? And so William lucks into the job of covering an up-and-coming band, Stillwater, for a legendary national magazine, and his road trip into the rock world begins.

Crowe works from a sure sense of oppositions, and Almost Famous basks in the fun of surrounding a smart but idealistic and almost criminally adorable kid ("Who brought Opie?" someone asks) with bad-boy rockers and sexy girl groupies. William's impossible expectations collide with the reality of Stillwater, a group that is one part talent and three parts egomania, hedonism, and phony profundity. Microphone in hand, the acolyte-journalist keeps trying to elicit philosophy from them, and keeps getting lines like "Rock and roll can save the world--and the chicks are great!" Stillwater's handsome lead guitarist, Russell (Billy Crudup), is the special object of William's hero worship, and Crowe plots a course of disenchantment that includes an acid-tripping Russell shouting from a rooftop to a throng of fans, "I am a golden god!"

If Almost Famous never becomes a satire in the manner of Rob Reiner's classic rock mockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap, it's not because Stillwater doesn't deserve it. Rather, some gentle affection keeps reining Crowe in. For long stretches he's happy just to take us out on the road with Stillwater, playing the comedy of William's phone calls home to Mom (she has him put Russell on the line for a stinging verbal spanking), or a harrowing plane ride through a storm, when band members start spewing deathbed confessions. Gradually a kind of plot develops in the triangle involving William, Russell, and the lead girl groupie, Penny Lane, played with angelic sultriness by Kate Hudson, Goldie Hawn's daughter.

This is an autobiographical film--the details of William's excellent adventure match those of Cameron Crowe's own, right down to the Rolling Stone gig--and you can feel Crowe trying to fashion his experiences into a narrative of moral education. But Almost Famous is less a rock bildungsroman than a boy's fantasy story, something akin to Tom Swift and His Amazing Rock Machine. The problem is how to draw resounding life lessons from the charmed story of precocity meeting incredible good luck--where's the adversity, the obstacle, the danger? All three of Crowe's earlier films (Say Anything, Singles, and Jerry Maguire) featured protagonists wanting things they couldn't have and having things they didn't want. But William has everything, right away. Ultimately, Crowe settles on a drama of integrity. William's rock-critic mentor, Lester Bangs, warns that a rock writer's first duty is to "be honest and merciless," which above all means never befriending the band you're writing about. Will William heed Bangs's warning, or cave in and cozy up to Stillwater? Will he stand tall as a "rock journalist," or sell out and write a puff piece?

It's a little weird to see such questions take center stage in the movie. After all, in journalistic consequence, this isn't exactly Woodward and Bernstein territory. More important, can we really believe that ethical temptations so preoccupy William, surrounded as he is by glitter and fame and sexy, available girls with porn-star-sounding names like Penny Lane, Sapphire, and Polexia? (Toward the middle of the movie, William in fact loses his virginity, and the scene barely causes a ripple.) The dilemma Crowe stakes out--namely, that while rock critics worship musicians and covet their approval, writing well about them means risking their wrath--is so narrow, indeed professional, that it risks turning a boy's coming-of-age story into a primer on journalistic ethics. Almost Famous hinges on concerns that seem vaguely trumped-up and classroomy, as if the real action is going on everywhere but where the teacher wants us to look.

The film doggedly preserves a core of innocence about music and human motives, and thereby remains lodged inside William's own idealized notions of integrity. We can only guess, for instance, at how much more complicated the rock world looks from where Lester Bangs is sitting; Crowe won't let us see it that way. Almost Famous remains a boy's movie to the end, with William rescuing Russell from a dangerous slide toward careerism, back into his once passionate love of music. (Not only that, but he's going to start treating his groupies with respect, too!). Crowe can't resist pushing Almost Famous up the arc of a moral lesson into a happy ending, and it all feels too clear and clean. The movie comes off as neater than its own materials.

But then, Cameron Crowe is a bit tidy himself. His work has the quality of a star student who does the assignment better than anyone else and then adds a touch of flair; the teachers love it, first because it's really good, but also because it makes them feel cool. At just twenty-four Crowe published a slick and almost eerily sure-handed nonfiction book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the movie of which (he wrote the screenplay) helped define '80s teen flicks. His own films so far--witty romances informed by a participant-observer's eye for the nuances of youth culture--can feel a little like TV, unerringly trained on what's popular, but they also keep surprising you with good writing and a stealthy human complexity. And always they aim unabashedly for the heart. Remember the lovely scene in Say Anything when John Cusack holds up a boom box blasting Peter Gabriel's ballad, "In Your Eyes," outside his girlfriend's house? That was a prime Crowe moment, warmly and wittily transforming a boom box, that instrument of public disruption, into a kind of serenading pop violin.

Tellingly, the soundtrack of Almost Famous is loaded with Cat Stevens, Elton John, Joni Mitchell, and Stevie Wonder, and the movie itself has a soft and warmly pleasant aura. William may long to be "dark and mysterious," but alas, as one of the groupies tells him, "Honey, you're too sweet for rock and roll," and the same may be true of Crowe. Where's the darkness in this movie? Where's the risk? For all Mom's worries about the perils of rock, William is never taken in: He instantly recognizes Russell's displays of narcissism for what they are, instead of being wowed; drugs hold no allure; and he barely seems to care about losing his virginity. Like William the movie comes across as genetically incapable of bad-boy rocker rebelliousness; it's good-boy through and through. Crowe's sunny, genial charm turns Almost Famous into a revisionist triumph of pop over rock.

Audiences will love this movie for its intelligent, mellow gentleness--a funny, feel-good movie even parents can like. Elaine can rest reassured: rock is really about romance, not sex; and while road-tripping sounds racy, really her son is out there honing his ethical skills, saving rockers' wayward souls, and carving out a nice little career for himself, all at once.

It's enough to make every Mom rush out and buy her boy a Stratocaster.