Almost Famous

It's got the music - but what's happened to the sex and drugs in Cameron Crowe's 1970s rock tribute, asks Peter Bradshaw

Garlanded with Golden Globes, Bafta nominations and Oscar rumours, this is the most over-rated cinema event of the year: a bafflingly heavy-handed coming-of-age nostalgia-fest about the early 1970s rock scene, apparently based on director Cameron Crowe's own teenage adventures in rock journalism. It systematically pulls the teeth from rock music, detaching from it all sense of danger, excitement and hedonism, making it instead a soundtrack for Crowe's heart-warming, mind-numbing morality tale about family values.

Patrick Fugit plays William, a cute 15-year-old who flukes his way into going on the road with an up-and-coming rock band called Stillwater, and writing about it for Rolling Stone. He's given big-brotherish support and advice from journalist Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman) but his querulous, protective mom Frances McDormand is having kittens about the whole business.

Spinal Tap set the bar very, very high for the level of humour and affectionate connoisseurship required for something like this and, in fact, Almost Famous often looks like Spinal Tap minus the gags and indeed the insight. (A scene in which the manager shows the band the new T-shirt design is practically a replica of Tap's notorious Smell the Glove album-cover argument.)

When Patrick tries to blag his way backstage, earnestly announcing himself as a "journalist", he gets a homily from Stillwater's lead guitarist Russell, played by Billy Crudup in the hairy, sloppy early-1970s mode he deployed for playing runner Steve Prefontaine in Without Limits. "We play for the fans, not the critics," he says. But Patrick shows Russell he knows all about the music, so they let him in. It is a basically a cumbersome, solemn version of Wayne and Garth throwing themselves at the feet of Alice Cooper and chanting: "We are not worthy." And Wayne's World seems oddly more sincere, and more knowledgeable, than Cameron Crowe's world. Here, and throughout, the vital element of wit is missing. But lots of other things are missing too.

Sex, for example. We all know about the crazed egotists of rock: the wildmen and Aleister Crowley enthusiasts with their retinues of jailbait groupies - the legions of wealthy men for whom feminism was still just a rumour. Almost Famous primly distinguishes between the exploited women and a higher class of girl called a "band aid" - more like a sweetly pretty and largely platonic muse on the tour bus - personified by the kooky yet gorgeous Penny Lane, played by the fantastically irritating Kate Hudson, who is perpetually laughing with transcendentally blonde flower-child wisdom. (Wouldn't Liv Tyler have been more piquant casting?) A group of older band-aids skittishly deflower innocent cherubic Patrick: a very cute reversal of the usual male- female roles in "deflowering" situations on the road.

So, please, who on earth does Crowe think he's kidding? Maybe the coy "band aid" stuff was what some rock star or rock chick told him when he was a naive teenager; maybe they believed it and maybe he believed them - at the time. But now?

Then there are drugs. There's no nasty jacking up - but Russell has an "acid trip": perhaps the safest, cleanest, most U-certificate Yellow Submarine acid trip in history. It causes him to be a bit feisty at a teenagers' party, jumping off the roof into a swimming pool, fully clothed. No Brian Jones-style dénouement , and afterwards he's as right as rain. The only overdose situation comes deliberately, when poor vulnerable and unhappy Penny Lane gets into a near-thing - with quaaludes, famously the pharmaceutical of choice for the Carpenter siblings.

Finally, of course, there's rock'n'roll itself, and Crowe's biggest crime is to make this sound so comfy and dull. The big problem is that we have to sit through a lot of Stillwater's imaginary numbers: and very vapid they are too. When a blast of real Jimi Hendrix comes on the soundtrack, it's like a slug of Jack Daniel's after drinking diluted Sunny Delight.

Inevitably, Patrick finally has to go home to mom, and there's a soupy "home's best" moral implied. Well, it's supposed to be a love letter to the period, and Crowe has made no bones about using a rose-tinted lens. But did he have to be so wilfully naive? And what's the point of sentimentally excising the dark side of rock when it's precisely the filth and sleaze that many of his target audience will be perversely sentimental about?

If this solemn and disconcertingly reactionary film gets Academy awards it will be very depressing, though perhaps a prize is due for Philip Seymour Hoffman: droll, raddled, winningly concerned for his young protege. He gets the film's one genuine laugh, dancing to Iggy Pop and doing a very wacky windmill movement with his arms. In the movie, Bangs is always warning that the dullards and the idiots would ruin rock. But the film itself is the warning.