Almost Famous is a movie directed by Cameron Crowe about a 15 year old teenager who aspires to be a rock journalist in the 1970s and tours with a rock band to write a story for Rolling Stone magazine. This is a must watch for anyone that is a film lover and people are into journalism.

The most interesting thing about this is our main character William Miller (portrayed by Patrick Fugit) struggles to balance the life of trying to be cool/friends with this band and being able to write a truthful and unmerciful story as all journalists should do. While watching this I wondered how much of this was real, and I found out that the director Crowe actually lived this life that our character did.

Pierce Baugh from Collider says. “Almost Famous is inspired by Crowe’s adolescent years as the youngest journalist that Rolling Stone has ever had, having been published in the magazine at just 16 years old.”

Having someone like Crowe write and direct a movie like this was perfect because while watching this movie it really did seem like most of what happened was from a true story yet the movie never indicates that it was from a real life event at all.

If I were to show any movie that shows how hard life is for journalism reporters, it would be this one. Even though other movies like Spotlight or even 20 Days In Mariupol show how hard it is for reporters to see these horrific things and still have to write a story about them, I think that a movie like Almost Famous captures a different side of it that we haven’t really seen in movies.

It shows that when you get so close to a topic you are writing about it is so hard to stay unbiased and not let anything that you see or hear not be included in the story even when you do become friends with the people you are writing about.

I think it’s important for journalism majors to see this movie as they may not be aware that this could be a problem and seeing it in this way is probably better than running into it in real life and having to deal with it that way.

I asked NECC student Ashlyn Garcia how she felt about this movie, and she said “Other than it just being such a cool movie to watch, I did enjoy seeing how difficult it could be writing an article like this when you are so intertwined with the subject of the story. It’s really such a sweet movie and one that I think about a lot.”