Cameron Crowe's most "personal" film to date, a nostalgia trip into the rock-and-roll scene of the early Seventies. The names have been changed, to cover up, perhaps, for revisions or lapses of memory, and for ingrained tendencies to sanitize and whitewash. The fifteen-year-old free-lance rock journalist -- Crowe's stand-in -- is now called William Miller (the dimply Patrick Fugit, projecting a Howdy Doody wholesomeness); and the fictitious heavy-metal band on whose tour he tags along is called Stillwater (Billy Crudup as the Jimmy Page-ish guitarist, Jason Lee as the Robert Plant-ian singer). Crowe has always been content to play to the crowd -- and the bigger the better. Or to put it another way: the blander the better. The upside of this, from certain points of view, is that the music of the period is here dribbled out in eye-dropper doses, and with a slightly skewed bias toward the "soft" (Cat Stevens, Steely Dan, Elton John). Earplugs will not be required. And the parental figure, a single-mom college professor, for all her mortifying overprotectiveness and nonpermissiveness (confiscating a Simon and Garfunkel album: "Honey, they're on pot"), is given a distinctive voice -- not to mention, in Frances McDormand's droll incarnation, distinctive mouth, chin, eyes, everything. Not a straw woman; a strong woman. (Crowe's own mother would surely approve.) A distinctive voice of a different generation issues from Philip Seymour Hoffman as the late rock critic Lester Bangs -- no name-change necessary -- and the hero's long-distance guru: "You cannot make friends with rock stars!" The matter of journalistic ethics -- the reporter's clear choice between "friend" and "enemy," the rockers' insidious campaign to woo him and win him -- is a worthwhile theme, explored with diligence. But it takes a backseat to the more moth-eaten material of the romantic triangle: the battle of the worshipful innocent and the frivolous libertine for the heart and soul of the unsullied groupie (Kate Hudson) -- or, as she prefers to be known, a "band-aid," a true muse rather than mere groupie. In the end it is not so much a matter of ethics as of bathos. We must remind ourselves, after all, that the film is autobiographical, and that the guiding principle of our autobiographer is popularity at any cost. It is harder than before to begrudge him that. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd