Almost Candid

Tim Riley listens for the unspoken ironies of Cameron Crowe’s career via his new memoir, ‘The Uncool.’

By Tim RileyJanuary 3, 2026

• Memoir & Essay

• Music

• Film

TURNING JUST ABOUT anything into a rock musical smacks as the antithesis of “rock ’n’ roll.” Cameron Crowe did this to his own rock movie totem, Almost Famous (2000), turning himself into a paradox. His sentimental impulse also drives his charming, conflicted new memoir, The Uncool. The book tracks his career as a journalist and screenwriter, culminating in the 2019 stage premiere of Almost Famous: The Musical—which slams up against the agonizing cancer death of his mother Alice.

Like fellow rock film classic This Is Spinal Tap (1984), Almost Famous endures largely because the competition for rock representation on the silver screen remains weak. Nobody goes to the movies for rock concert thrills; biopics do not deepen any listener’s understanding of Freddie Mercury or Elton John. Does anybody prefer A Complete Unknown (2024) to Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde (1966)? Does Nebraska (1982) cry out for Jeremy Allen White’s Bruce Springsteen to somehow authenticate its anguish? Among Crowe’s other films (1996’s Jerry Maguire, 2001’s Vanilla Sky), rock’s waterfall spray hits with more rainbow colors in his scripts for Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Singles (1992). By the release of We Bought a Zoo (2011) and Aloha (2015), Crowe’s arc had tilted pretty far in the non-rock direction.

Almost Famous succeeds by capturing a specific early-1970s feel, tracking an eager 15-year-old from San Diego who hustles his way into Rolling Stone magazine. The film’s casting elevates its script: the alchemy of Frances McDormand’s fierce maternal love as Elaine, and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lester Bangs, who inhabits the film’s weary, brilliant conscience. Crowe’s Oscar-winning screenplay both revels in and gently parses rock’s backstage world, capturing a moment when a wide-eyed kid could serve as a fan’s ears for rock stars’ hot air.

The Uncool spins out from there, detailing the messy life behind the movie. Crowe threads his own family tragedy—including an older sister’s suicide—alongside a portrait of his mother, creating a narrative that, like his best work, glimpses profound pain before retreating to a safer, reassuring space. (Let’s put on a show!) But as with so many rock stories, why fuss with the original media as if the material needs some different stripe of legitimacy—The Uncool reads much more like a memoir of a fictional movie than like someone’s journal. And only a Mr. Show satirist would put songs to it. Does anybody think Almost Famous lacks a backstory?

Crowe’s life has its showbiz dish, though that sibling suicide (when Crowe was just 14) blows a hole in the narrative that never fully heals. Like the music of David Bowie or the Allman Brothers, who leave their grief unprocessed, Crowe swerves around the gaping sadness gnawing at his story’s edges—just as he sidesteps his famous marriage to Heart’s Nancy Wilson. It’s a sincere dodge posing as a confessional.

The core tension of Crowe’s career, and this book, is the push and pull between access and reflection. He recounts sitting in on writing sessions for the Eagles’ “One of These Nights,” a fan’s fantasy. Where critics blanched at the band’s smug commercialism, Crowe fawns. Throughout the memoir, he parades a cavalcade of icons: Kris Kristofferson boozing his way through genial chats; David Bowie bouncing into a room like “a marionette.” These star moments stave off the deeper currents of loss that stir the best books and the best rock music. The memoir’s most touching passages only hint at his family’s ache: “When you lose a child, you seek purpose and reason,” his mother tells him. But these wrenching thoughts, offered only in glimpses, are fought off in the name of staying “uncool.”

To that end, Crowe’s origin story has all the classic Hollywood curves. He and his mother catch a young Bob Dylan for $1.50 at the UC Riverside gym in 1964, winning her over despite her wariness of youth culture. That night, they would have heard Dylan sing “Who Killed Davey Moore?” and “Talkin’ World War III Blues.” Alice Crowe admired Dylan’s comical take on kooks: “Watch out for the John Birch Society,” she warns. “One day they’ll take over. They’ll disguise themselves as Republicans and put all the teachers in jail!” (One subtext of this material is how blessed Alice is to miss our contemporary headlines.) Crowe pins his mother’s aphorisms into chapter headings, but most read like refrigerator magnets. His own variants, or those he captures in interviews, provide more spark, like this nugget from Dylan, delivered in Crowe’s living room in 1985: “That’s what the sixties were like. Everybody was there, but only a few people saw it.”

Early road trips up to the Sunset Strip connect Crowe with future Doors manager Danny Sugerman and club staple Rodney Bingenheimer, “the Hollywood scene-maker who sported a British rock star bowl cut and a tiny voice that sounded like a sigh […] a West Coast Andy Warhol who was famous for being semifamous.” Soon, the kid is fibbing about his age to David Bowie: “‘Nineteen,’ I lied. […] ‘See!’ Bowie was thrilled. ‘Young enough to be honest!’”

Crowe’s hustle sets up his big break: in the aftermath of a ruinous Grover Lewis piece on the Allman Brothers Band, published less than a week after the death of guitarist Duane Allman, Crowe convinces grieving brother Gregg to talk. Crowe’s blank-slate innocence offers just the sounding board Allman needs: a nonjudgmental listener who sponges up choice quotes:

“The real question,” [Allman] said, “is not why we’re so popular. […] The question is what made the Allman Brothers keep on going. […] We’d all have turned into fucking vegetables if we hadn’t been able to get out there and play. That’s when the success was, Jack. Success was being able to keep your brain inside your head.”

Immediately regretting his vulnerability, Allman blindsides Crowe with a cocaine-fueled tirade and confiscates his interview cassettes. This delays the story by two years. But Crowe follows his nose and keeps reporting on Lynyrd Skynyrd, Poco, Jackson Browne, and the Eagles. And his persistence leads to the book’s central reckoning. After a blood oath to avoid the magazine that panned Led Zeppelin, guitarist Jimmy Page reverses course, sizing up Crowe as a glorified stenographer for a 1975 cover story. Crowe somehow convinces Page that, as a writer, he doesn’t review Led Zeppelin records and stands apart from the magazine’s opinion of the band’s music. Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner flies the kid to New York for a dressing-down. “Listen,” Wenner tells him, “You missed the story. […] I mean you clearly love Led Zeppelin, but what was your purpose here?” Wenner does not explain what he means by “the story” Crowe purportedly “missed.” We understand this to be no more than capricious hypocrisy: it was Wenner who ran Crowe’s Zep profile as a splashy, bestselling cover, then chastised the young writer for sycophancy. He even hands Crowe a copy of Joan Didion’s The White Album (1979), pointing to her Jim Morrison profile as an object lesson.

Though Crowe treasured the Didion book, Wenner’s directive simply evaporates. After Joni Mitchell gifts him a painting signed with the note, “Thanks for the cooperation,” Crowe writes: “I knew instantly I could never put it where a fellow journalist might see it. Famous for her honesty, she had outed me as a collaborator. […] What might have been considered criminal to some journalists was a key to her comfort.”

And yet, Crowe found success as a profiler, and his affection for both the music and the manual labor behind it summoned many strong pieces. Besides omitting Nancy Wilson, he also slights his own modest yet enjoyable TV show, Roadies, which aired on Showtime in 2016. Panned by critics, the series oozed Crowe’s signature romanticism, exploring the intimate politics of band life and the accidental bonds forged among the backstage crew. The tour manager (played by Luke Wilson) and the production manager (Carla Gugino) offered credible players for these themes—showbiz touring pros whose long-distance relationships falter for the sake of the music. Crowe called in favors for guest spots from Lindsey Buckingham, Jackson Browne, and Eddie Vedder. As a workplace dramedy, it played up the romance of the grind. Nobody bought a zoo.

Both Almost Famous and The Uncool pivot off the irony of a music journalist who grew up to win an Academy Award for screenwriting, not rock writing. The memoir puts you in the room for delicious stories but ultimately glosses over some big trade-offs, offering intimacy papered over with unprocessed grief, favoring celebrity access over critical thinking. But Crowe’s prose successfully captures the unguarded moment, just as Joni Mitchell sings, “You know the times you impress me most / Are the times when you don’t try.” In the throes of losing his mother, he grasps how hospital waiting room decor can mock what people go through there: “Where turmoil and sadness live, Styrofoam follows.”