"Almost Famous"

I defy anyone who was young and tuned in to pop culture in the '70s not to bite his or her lip when Penny first struts onto the scene with her leggy walk and tailored fur-trimmed coat. She's the embodiment of the girl everyone wanted to sleep with or to be, a translucent princess who's nonetheless completely approachable and surprisingly grounded.

Penny is Russell's on-the-road girlfriend, an amusement for him while he's away from his old lady. The commonly used term for such young women, those eager to nestle into a star's orbit even for just the time it takes to blow him, is groupie. Almost everyone, even those who've never slept with one, has an opinion about them, from derision to a condescending kind of protectiveness. ("They just don't know what they're doing.") But in an interview in Premiere, Crowe noted that the ones he knew were "closer to the heart of rock 'n' roll than most of the musicians they slept with."

I think that's why Penny, and not William, is the soul of "Almost Famous," a dreams-made-flesh version not of the kind of girl who inspires rock songs but of the girls who fall so deeply in love with them that they confer a kind of nobility on their very existence. Of course, the '70s are now long past, and things are different; as a group, women are making more and better music than they ever have. But in the days before the Runaways, Poly Styrene, the Raincoats, L7 or Sleater-Kinney, most of us were by and large observers: That's simply a fact. Some of us wanted to get close to rock stars by sleeping with them. For those who did, the choice could be well-informed and positive or supremely ill-advised -- in other words, not much different from sleeping with regular guys.

Over the years acres and acres of feminist theory have been laid out to define the horrifying aspects of women's passivity in the rock arena. But those arguments are somehow insulting in themselves: Whoever said that just listening, really listening, is ever passive? A woman can be the subject of a song, its muse, its target, but she can also possess the very set of ears that completes it. The old (and unequivocally accurate) adage that boys form bands so they can get girls is proof of that truth in its roughest form. But the crude truth harbors a finer one: Rock 'n' roll, originally the province of men, needs women, or its existence means nothing.

Penny advises the other Band-Aids that the most important thing is never to take their liaisons too seriously. "If you ever get lonely, you go to the record store and you visit your friends," she advises them, an affirmation that, at least in theory, the music comes first. Of course, Penny loses sight of her own dictum: She falls devastatingly in love with Russell, who ends up treating her horribly. That opens a space for William, who of course has fallen in love with her, to come to her rescue.

But Penny, as Hudson plays her, is anything but a passive character. She may be ethereally unattainable, but she's also achingly real. In the scene where she learns exactly how Russell has betrayed her, she's backlighted with sunlight that shimmers through her diaphanous blouse and her halo of curls. She's dreamy all right, but the thing that stops her from being merely a vision of nostalgia is the bright flashes of pain you can read in her eyes -- if you make the effort to look there. She's the crushingly beautiful girl that you can see, or choose not to see. If you fail to look closely, it's your loss, not hers.

Crowe's vision of rock 'n' roll pulls all the usual elements -- loud guitars, cool guys, excess and debauchery -- into its orbit, but Penny Lane (who is, as the movie credits tell us, loosely based on a person Crowe knew in real life) represents the pleasure of the music in its purest form. And of course, if one were to pin a gender on the concept of pleasure, it could only be a "she." Everyone knows God modeled the phallus after the shape of a guitar. And that's just because she really dug the sound.

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