Failure is such a huge part of our human existence, yet it is something we hardly speak about or explore with patience and care. There is a bit of a taboo around failure. Everybody wants to laser-focus on success — the new shiny thing, the next great hope, the unicorn start-up. Failure is much less excavated and, therefore, it remains a far more unknown continent — readily available for literary exploration — than the small, bright circle of what constitutes “success.”

Today’s line of thought started when I watched Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous again on a plane a few days ago. I had remembered it as a great film but I had not anticipated the flood of feelings it would bring up in me. I found myself crying at several points during the film, which is a comic, tender, coming-of-age story about a gifted teenager who gets a Rolling Stone assignment to cover his favorite rock band as they tour across America in 1973. He falls for one of the young women — they reject the term “groupies” for the more dignified “band-aids” — who follow such bands around, making love with the musicians and often getting cast aside eventually.

The film captures the great power and agonizing ambiguity of adolescent emotions. Also, it explores the theme of unrequited love, which has most definitely figured large in my life as one entry in the larger “failure” ledger. Almost Famous features the doomed Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the equally doomed rock critic, Lester Bangs. I suppose those themes — of adolescent precocity, emotional awkwardness, and unrequited love — were some of the themes that called forth such a surprising emotional response. You never know what is going to touch you until something does.

Of course, this film centers the White heterosexual male “gaze” or perspective, which I share. Crowe was born in 1957, nine years before me. The film is somewhat autobiographical, although much was made up. Crowe wrote letters to Lester Bangs and started a friendship with the critic when he was in high school. He somehow got a major assignment from Rolling Stone when he was fifteen, spending six weeks on the road with The Allman Brothers (turned into the fictional band Stillwater in the film). He had an eccentric, intellectual mom much like the one portrayed so beautifully by Frances McDormand in the film.

I feel if I was to seek to articulate all of the different reasons the film affected me, it would require a rhizomatic mapping, overlapping skeins of culture, adolescent longings, American ideology, literature, rock and roll, sex. I might have to write a full-length tome to sort through all of it. Some of the emotional resonance comes from seeing Almost Famous again at this particular moment in American history; this inevitable catastrophe where we live through the unbelievably pathetic crumbling of the American Empire, along with the forfeiture of the American Dream. Rock and Roll — also the free-jazz hyper-literary New Journalism that flourished in the 1960s and 70s — represent connected facets of this collapsing American Dream / Nightmare / Empire: The 1960s Beat/hippie vision of anti-capitalist personal liberation as a source of societal renewal rotted into the hedonist/narcissist abandon of the 1970s. In retrospect, I suspect “America” reached its self-contradictory apotheosis and started to decay somewhere in that ten-year period (1965 - 1975).

As Bangs tells William, the protagonist in the film, by 1973 rock and roll was already finished, its primordial and disruptive energy efficiently absorbed into commercial circuits and corporate power structures. I was too young to appreciate Bangs while he was alive — he died in 1982 at the age of thirty-three, having destroyed himself with drugs and alcohol. Bangs was the tragic prophet of rock and roll’s demise, catching the last incandescent embers and embedding the vital sparks in his reviews for Creem and other rock magazines. I caught up with Bangs in 1999, when an anthology of his writing, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, was published to considerable fanfare. I loved that book.

Taking an hour from my life to tunnel back into the Lester Bangs wormhole, I read Maria Bustillos’ wonderful essay, “Lester Bangs: Truth-Teller” from The New Yorker. She describes Bangs as

a wreck of a man… fat, sweaty, unkempt—an out-of-control alcoholic in torn jeans and a too-small black leather jacket; crocked to the gills on the Romilar cough syrup he swigged down by the bottle. He also had the most advanced and exquisite taste of any American writer of his generation, uneven and erratic as it was.

He was born into the Jehovah’s Witness cult and developed, in Bustillos’ words,

a pure hatred of the lies and whitewashings of religion and government, his mutiny balanced against a bone-deep love of the truth—no matter how messy or unpretty it might turn out to be—which he equated with the refuge he’d found in literature and music. In fact, the messier, the more “real” art could be, the better.

About the Stooges, one of his favorite bands, Bangs described their “crazed quaking uncertainty” and “an errant foolishness that effectively mirrors the absurdity and desperation of the times, but … they also carry a strong element of cure, a post-derangement sanity.”

I feel I share something of Bangs’ metaphysical desperation and hunger to restore justice to the world, despite mainly having the almost useless medium of written words to try to do so.