I was fortunate to find another film released this year that I can recommend - Cameron Crowe's autobiographical "Almost Famous." Crowe brings to the screen his early days as a 15 year old Rolling Stone writer (they don't know his age when they commission him to do a story) as he (played by Patrick Fugit) travels with and writes a cover piece about the rising band Stillwater (lead singer Jason Lee, lead guitarist Billy Crudup, and a drummer and bassist - who, as anyone who is in a band knows - are generally nameless). It is Crowe's coming of age film, bittersweet, sentimental and light. It is also about the last days of rock and roll's innocence - 1973 - when you could still bring your record into a radio station and get it played.
Like Haley Joel Osment, Fugit is a smart, young actor whose eyes do a great dela of the work, and he presents a blend of awe, earnestness, and honor as he is introduced into the world of sex, drugs and rock and roll. His only ties outside his bus and later plane travel with a rock band are to Creem magazine inspiration Lester Bangs (a good, funny bit by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who aquits himself in films good and bad - he was one of the few decent things about "Magnolia") and his mother, a psychology professor and supreme individualist in child-rearing (Frances McDormand) who consistently calls Fugit on the road and "freaks" the band out.
I don't necessarily recommend the film to hardened realists, condemnors of whimsy or to folks for whom rock music was secondary or negligible during their teen years. It may resonate, it may not. But to those who listened to Pete Townsend during any of their at-the-time baleful cataclysms of teen years, and were convinced Pete was talking to them, or who remember the kiss of that girl (in the film, it is Kate Hudson as groupie Penny Lane) at a concert when under just the right mixture of beer and marijuana, than this film will strike home.
