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Based on his own youth, Almost Famous follows the perpetually uncool William Miller (newcomer Patrick Fugit) as he moves from the restrictive parenting of his mom (Frances McDormand) to falling for rock music and befriending the brilliantly crotchety music critic Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to going on tour with a band in 1973, at age 15, and writing about it for Rolling Stone. Along the way he falls in love (and into a love triangle) with Penny Lane (Kate Hudson in a breakout role), who's had an on-going relationship with star guitarist Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup). Andy Spletzer caught up with Crowe in Seattle during the director's brief stopover in a small terminal at Seattle's Boeing Fieldd Based on his own youth, Almost Famous follows the perpetually uncool William Miller (newcomer Patrick Fugit) as he moves from the restrictive parenting of his mom (Frances McDormand) to falling for rock music and befriending the brilliantly crotchety music critic Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to going on tour with a band in 1973, at age 15, and writing about it for Rolling Stone. Along the way he falls in love (and into a love triangle) with Penny Lane (Kate Hudson in a breakout role), who's had an on-going relationship with star guitarist Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup). Andy Spletzer caught up with Crowe in Seattle during the director's brief stopover in a small terminal at Seattle's Boeing Field. The band in the movie is called Stillwater, a fictional group that is obviously an amalgam of several groups that Crowe toured with and wrote about during his many years with Rolling Stone. Asking who the band is based on is one of those questions that's usually sidestepped. "A lot of it's the Allman Brothers," Crowe says up-front and without hesitation, a band that he went on tour with for several weeks while he was just 16. How do you feel about going to Toronto? I'm totally thrilled that we're going to Toronto. Movies that I've loved started out in the Toronto Film Festival. It's just a great tradition. The cast and everybody is just jacked about it, so we'll see what happens. Who is the band based on? A lot of it's the Allman Brothers. At one point I thought about doing it as the Allman Brothers, to be honest with you, but they deserve their own movie, and not some VH1 biopic, either. That story has got a lot of pain and heartache and obviously death. I accessed part of that experience, and also just combined it with the Eagles, Leonard Skynnard, the Who, and a lot of the American bands that don't get written about in rock movies. It's easier to write the English guys. They dress more flamboyantly and they speak GRANDLY, whereas the American guys are more like, 'Let's go get some barbecue.' How does William Miller differ from a young Cameron Crowe? I looked older than Patrick looks in the movie and I was a little different than Patrick. Which helped me direct him, I think. I was more of the clown. I would play the prankster character more, which helped me to fit in. Patrick plays the observer. What it would be like if the main character was named Cameron Crowe? That would be too weird. That would be just narcissistic. I'm sorry. But what would be different if he used his real name? Here's what would be different: I wouldn't make the movie. It would be in my drawer. Lester [Bangs], I thought it was okay to use his real name because I wanted people to know about Lester... Lester said almost everything that's in the movie, and more. The point of all this is, I was there and I saw sexual abuse and I saw TVs going out the window and I saw all that stuff, and I observed enough of what that era really was about to be able to say that the poetry of that era is under-represented. I never got into music because I thought the guy used a mud shark [on a groupie] in a hotel room. I never got into a song more because I knew a guy was on heroin. What I've not seen in the many that tried to capture the rock era is something that waves the flag for fandom, and that's what I tried to do with this movie.