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A few years back, Cameron Crowe had an idea. It’d be a movie. Something funny and romantic. There’d be some music. He told his son William about it, presenting to him his latest big love story. Crowe, damp and with freshly showered hair over video from his home in Los Angeles, takes a pause, as if gearing me up for a punchline. “Eventually [my son] says, ‘Hmm… I don’t know… it’s very Cameron Crowe, isn’t it?’”
William, a screenwriting major in university, volunteered some suggestions. “Why don’t you set it in futuristic Japan? And no one can walk on the ground anymore, and there are spaceships flying around, but everyone’s listening to Eighties music. The whole story would work in that context, too.”
Crowe, meanwhile, was still stuck on the first thought. “Very Cameron Crowe?” he gasped. “What the hell are you talking about?”
But, really, he got it. He’s a creature of habit. Crowe’s films – Gen X touchstones including Almost Famous, Say Anything and Jerry Maguire – are about earnest dreamers; overgrown teenagers (or literal teenagers); the flawed if always palatable. His films have a habit of suddenly becoming pop videos, their soundtracks holding just as much importance as the camera lens or the boom mic. Phoebe Cates disrobing to The Cars in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Crowe wrote the screenplay). Jonathan Lipnicki being adorable while Bruce Springsteen growls softly about secret gardens in Jerry Maguire. John Cusack holding up that damn boombox as it plays Peter Gabriel in Say Anything…. You wonder if the only reason “Crowe-ian” hasn’t joined the lexicon alongside “Lynchian” or “Hitchcockian” is because the word sounds so, well, silly.
Anyway, ask him now to unpack it a little, this “very Cameron Crowe” thing, and its definition pours out of him immediately. “A friend of mine said this recently: ‘You have an unironic view of your characters. You love them, and you don’t judge them. You put them out there so people can hang out with them and make their own minds up about them’.” Crowe flashes one of those lopsided smiles of his. “And I guess I do kinda value the wounded optimist.”
‘Vanilla Sky’ was the beginning of knowing that there’s not going to be an endless honeymoon for anyone who wants to have a longish career
Crowe is also a filmmaker whose life story is so fascinating that it’s basically a movie unto itself. And it’s why no one found it annoying when, 25 years ago, he actually turned it into one. Almost Famous was a semi-autobiographical take on his maddeningly starry adolescence, when he became – through a mix of good fortune and raw ability – the youngest ever contributor to Rolling Stone magazine. By the age of 15, he’d already begun trailing some of the biggest rock stars of the Seventies across the US, profiling acts such as Led Zeppelin, the Eagles and Deep Purple. He was the rare journalist who didn’t piss off Van Morrison, spent 18 months on the road with David Bowie, and got famously inhibited stars – among them Joni Mitchell and Gregg Allman – to spill the beans. Crowe has now recounted this time in his life in The Uncool, a warm-hearted memoir as lively, sentimental and plain envy-inducing as the movie it inspired back in 2000.
The young Crowe undoubtedly had a way with people, insinuating himself backstage to grab moments of time with Black Sabbath or Yes, first at the San Diego newspaper The Door, then at Rolling Stone. “I was basically this annoying kid with an orange bag asking too many f***ing questions,” he laughs. “But that’s how many doors got opened.” He often wonders in the book why his interviewees would give him the time of day. “Why me?” he asks himself, as Bowie opens up his life to him over the course of a year and a half. “What convinced him to take me – a journalist! – along for the ride?”
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It’s a question he’s still asking himself. “I’m not sure why it happened the way it happened,” he says. “What I can tell you, though, is that when I’ve been making movies, you’ll sometimes see someone show up, like someone who knows a crew member or a cast member, and they’re just so interested in being there.” He laughs. “There’s no real agenda. They’re just so happy to be close to the flame that it’s kind of inspiring. You like having that person around, so you’re like, ‘hey, come with us to the next location’.”
Crowe was, most of all, a fan of the people he interviewed. It was an approach that some of his mentors had problems with, notably the legendary rock critic Lester Bangs – played with gentle magnetism by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Almost Famous. He warned the young Crowe, “don’t make friends with the rock stars – they’ll ruin you.” Crowe took it a little to heart – few of his subjects became actual friends – but he spoke to his interviewees with empathy and real reverence, which often proved effective in getting them to open up. “It helps to have somebody who’s emotionally cheering for you,” he says.
It’s funny, and sort of depressing, to be a writer in 2025 speaking to Crowe, who got unprecedented access to legends at a time in which writers, interviews and print magazines were still prized and respected. Crowe typically got weeks with some of the biggest names in rock. With Crowe today, I have 40 minutes. He is kind, engaged and nicely paternal company throughout – but it’s still 40 minutes. “Well, it was easier when there weren’t junkets,” he laughs. The ecosystem is different now – interviews take place on conveyer belts. Another journalist will be Zooming with Crowe right after me.
“There’s a lot of marketing going on, and people don’t want to get the marketing f***ed up,” he says. “And a lot of people are scared. They don’t want to get cancelled. They don’t want to open their doors to the wrong person. And they often don’t want to give away their best stories for free. They maybe want to save them for their own documentaries.” As we speak, Taylor Swift is sitting at No 1 at the US box office with a pseudo-movie in which she discusses her new album, while the only full-length sitdown she’s done to discuss it is on her fiancé’s podcast. The world has changed. “Music also went mainstream,” Crowe adds. “You have the president talking about Puff Daddy. It’s no longer this niche shared by die-hard music lovers.”
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Crowe discovered music while growing up in Palm Springs and then San Diego. His mother, a dazzling, strong-willed woman with a penchant for wise aphorisms, initially feared the influence of rock on her son, worrying it’d serve as a distraction from his studies. Crowe was a brilliant student, skipping several grades due to his aptitude for education. But this only fed his love of music, as well as his interest in writing about music. “I didn’t have a lot of friends, so a lot of my life back then was me really begging to find a crowd and a voice. It came from loving music.”
Largely missing from the Cameron Crowe story until now is the influence of his older sister Cathy, an analogue of whom – unlike his mother and sister Cindy – wasn’t included in Almost Famous. It was partly out of respect. Cathy took her own life at the age of 19, when Crowe was just 10. “I couldn’t write about it for a long time,” he says. “I thought it would cause too much pain in my family, and reopen wounds.” When Crowe’s mother died in 2019, he began to properly consider Cathy’s legacy, and the mark she left on him. “Cathy was the person that really turned me on to art and music, and a particular feeling about life.” He calls it “the happy/sad” – songs like those she most adored, like “Silence Is Golden” by The Tremeloes or “Surfer Girl” by The Beach Boys, that sound like utter sunshine but are also wistful and melancholy.
Her favourite book, he later discovered, was called The Fairy Doll. “It’s about a young girl that couldn’t fit in and was unappreciated, even in her own family, but who found her own voice in the world through a noise – so basically music,” Crowe says. “And when I read it, it just felt like Cathy was knocking at the door for me.”
The Uncool is being published amid what feels like a resurgence for Crowe, which has seen him return to his roots after a decade or two in the creative weeds. A musical adaptation of Almost Famous hit Broadway in 2019, and he is currently at work on a Joni Mitchell biopic, rumoured to span her life and star Anya Taylor-Joy and Meryl Streep in the title role. “It feels like the exact thing for me to do right now, which is a movie about somebody worth making a movie about, and something that really has my voice in it.”
He’s aware that not everything he’s done in the last 20 years has been as well-received as his earlier work. Crowe stepped away from magazine writing in 1977, at the age of 20, largely to focus on writing a book. It was the coming-of-age saga Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which was then optioned as a movie, and which he was asked to script. The rest was charmed: Fast Times led to Say Anything…, which led to the Gen X romcom Singles and then Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous. But the wheels flew off a little right after. Vanilla Sky, starring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, was an ambitious if overstretched head-f*** in 2001 that continues to be divisive to this day. His 2005 romance Elizabethtown, with Kirsten Dunst and Orlando Bloom, was immortalised as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl nightmare. Few even saw Aloha, the overegged weapons satellite romcom with Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone and Rachel McAdams, but which drew terrible reviews in 2015. “Vanilla Sky was the beginning of knowing that there’s not going to be an endless honeymoon for anyone who wants to have a longish career,” he says. “It comes in waves.”
He remains proud of We Bought a Zoo, he adds – that was the Matt Damon-starring, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin dramedy he made in 2011. “A lot of people, particularly in Covid, found that movie to be really fun and comforting. It possibly had an unfortunate title, but it’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever done. So I think time is always your friend. It raises certain things up and then puts other things aside. I’m just grateful I still get to do this.” Besides the Joni Mitchell film, he’s publishing a compendium of his interviews next year, which will be accompanied by new interviews with the same people done years later.
I tell him that the concept of that sounds terrifying. If you’re lucky enough to interview your absolute heroes, those interactions sometimes leave such a mark that they become reference points in your own life, something to mention at parties or to impress your friends. But, fundamentally, you’ll probably never see that hero in question ever again, and it’s doubtful they’d remember you if you did. I tell Crowe this because one of the most fascinating sections of the book sees him reunite with David Bowie three decades after their time on the road, for another issue of Rolling Stone. It is 2006, Bowie long into his elder statesman era by that point, while Crowe has become a Hollywood big-shot and Oscar winner. Over the phone, Crowe thanks Bowie for those 18 months, telling him that it shaped for him “everything that came after”. Bowie replies that he is “glad it meant something to you”, but with “his familiar jovial voice sounding slightly detached”, Crowe writes.
“He didn’t want to go back there,” Crowe says now. “I would read his quotes back to him. Like, ‘you said Patti Smith and Kraftwerk would be all that’s remembered from this time’, but he wouldn’t bite. He kept batting it all back to me, and eventually just said, ‘Cameron, those were the insane ramblings of a young man addicted to amphetamines’.”
Crowe laughs, winces.
“He just didn’t want to go back there. He was in love with his wife, having a beautiful life living in Soho.”
Did it sadden him that he didn’t recall most of their time together?
“You know what, I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I think he remembered it all. He just didn’t want to remember it with me, but that’s OK.”
It’s a better ending. More wholesome. Very Cameron Crowe.
‘The Uncool’ is released on 28 October via 4th Estate