Review of filmmaker Cameron Crowe’s memoir The Uncool

Explore Cameron Crowe's memoir, The Uncool, a captivating journey through his extraordinary life and love for music.

As a teenager meeting a girl for a first date, Cameron Crowe took her to meet David Bowie. Cameron Crowe smuggled marijuana seeds from Bob Marley’s private stash. Cameron Crowe moved in with The Eagles to write about them. The filmmaker has lived an unbelievable life, and he shares his wide-eyed wonder — and uniquely underage vantage point — in a new memoir, The Uncool. Reading it feels like reading the liner notes to a person.

As someone who became a film critic entirely by accident, I had found gospel within Crowe’s Oscar-winning autobiographical film Almost Famous. Philip Seymour Hoffman, playing the critic Lester Bangs, warns the teenage protagonist: “You cannot make friends with the rockstars,” he says. “They’re going to buy you drinks, you’re gonna meet girls, they’re going to try to fly you places for free, offer you drugs. I know it sounds great. But these people are not your friends.” This bit, mandatory for any critic surrounded by glitzy people, became my credo: “You have to make your reputation on being honest and unmerciful.”

A still from Jerry Maguire.

Cameron Crowe, bless his heart, is no critic.

He is, first and foremost, a fan, gaping at the people behind the songs that shaped his yearning and his youth, his teenage dreams and his turns of phrase. Too young to be allowed inside a bar, Crowe sat outside one to interview the great Kris Kristofferson. After “a short answer and a lengthy silence,” he decided not to fill the void, and Kristofferson eventually spilled forth. “The more I didn’t speak, the more he enjoyed our conversation.”

Cameron Crowe and Jimmy Fallon pose backstage at the Broadway musical based on the film Almost Famous in New York. | Photo Credit: Getty Images