Great Character: Lester Bangs (“Almost Famous”)
Since the kids are heading back to school, this month’s theme: Mentor. Today in his regular weekly guest post, Jason Cuthbert looks at Lester Bangs from the 2000 movie Almost Famous, written and directed by Cameron Crowe.
“Lester Bangs.” This boisterous title sounds like the intellectual property of a porn star. But “Lester Bangs” could just as easily pass for the bankable stage name of one of the many rock stars that Mr. Bangs himself immortalized or demoralized in Creem and Rolling Stone magazines. Truth be told, “Lester Bangs” is not just some imaginative publication pen name, it’s something way cooler — the real life provocative scribe’s actual birth name.
In the 2000 coming-of-age dramedy Almost Famous, Lester Bangs is the “Iggy Pop in the A.M.” raconteur channeling his free-spirited, freethinking, freedom-through-originality nature like a true Sagittarian. He pumps this contagious gusto into 15-year old William Miller (Patrick Fugit) as this naïve lad’s brutally honest industry mentor.
Almost Famous plot summary from IMDB:
A high-school boy is given the chance to write a story for Rolling Stone Magazine about an up-and-coming rock band as he accompanies it on their concert tour.
Philip Seymour Hoffman added another dynamic living, breathing “I know a guy like that” character to his illustrious resume with his punchy performance as the passionate rock music critic Lester Bangs. Director and screenwriter Cameron Crowe’s Academy Award-winning (Best Original Screenplay) homage to his own adolescent rock writer roots is a road trip towards William Miller’s manhood during his first Rolling Stone assignment on tour with a fictitious feuding band named Stillwater. As a drug-free, non-boozing, over-achieving virgin with no evident male role models within his bloodline, young William Miller may be prematurely matured by sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, but he is maturely matured by Lester Bangs.
Creatives generally graduate from one of two opposing schools-of-thought: those that can be bought and those that aren’t buying into it. Lester Bangs clearly has no bargain sale price tag dangling from his backside. To Bangs, artistic integrity is not just some convenient credo of a closet hypocrite, it’s the rarified air that keeps him afloat — and he expects his high-flying “golden gods” of rock to follow suit.
LESTER BANGS: Here’s a theory for you to disregard. Completely…Music, you know, true music — not just rock n roll — it chooses you. It live in your car, or alone listening to your headphones, you know, with the cast scenic bridges and angelic choirs in your brain. It’s a place apart from the vast, benign lap of America.
Lester Bangs is a class act mentor character in that he stands to gain nothing personally from making a professional man-of-letters out of William. Lester is simply grooming his impressionable comrade to maybe share his insular rock culture appetite with him. If Lester can have progressive and excessive debates about Lou Reed with his pliable protégé, then mission accomplished.
LESTER BANGS: Your writing is damn good. It’s just a shame you missed out on rock ‘n roll. It’s over.
Lester Bang’s alphabetic infection is a visible virus that any screenwriter crafting uncommisioned scripts for a potential audience-of-one can feel the “crack head shakes” from. This unconditional love arouses those bred from the visionary ilk, willing to stroll forward through the madhouse of uncertainty, guided only by the agonizing belief that we have yet to sleep in our real bed.
LESTER BANGS: I used to do speed…you know…and sometimes a little cough syrup. I would stay up all night, just writing and writing. Like 25 pages of dribble. You know, about the faces of Coltrane. You know, just to fucking write.
Bangs can smell that breast milk and baby food on William’s breath before the kid even opens his mouth. Willy’s pubescent baby-face advertises the antithesis to controversy. He is a wholehearted lamb that hasn’t grown his wool coat yet and Lester is clearly a commendable shepherd. A more traditional, unscrupulous colleague in the entertainment industry might have turned William’s frozen smile enthusiasm into the jaded regrets of a glorified indentured servant. But what exactly is Good Guy Lester looking to teach his eager pupil? The journalistic lesson is: the value of trusting the truth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpISLkb5L5E
Lester understands that after the energizing glamour of the limelight has faded into the polluted smog of cigarette butt mountains and post-sex groupies — your only friends are the time-tested mates you had before the concert began. This makes Lester either a gifted fortune teller or he himself has been disappointed by disingenuous lead singers playing the “friendship card” to cash in their celebrity chips for favorable media coverage. He speaks like his feelings have never fully mended, so the autobiographic nature of his sermons seems authentic. But the self-depreciating pain inside of Lester reveals a deeper insecurity that may have become apparent to him years before he was ever published:
LESTER BANGS: “I’m uncool.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzY2pWrXB_0
For his undiluted addiction to undiluted music, for his legacy expansion through “big brothering” a younger writer without succumbing to the role of posturing gatekeeper, for treating the written word like the dignified art form that it truly is, and for simply having a name so damn cool it doesn’t need an alias — LESTER BANGS is an unapologetically GREAT CHARACTER.
This is one of my all-time favorite secondary characters in a movie. Every moment where Bangs is on-screen is filled with meaning. Here is the real Lester Bangs:
Of course, the dialogue referenced above about speed and cough syrup is prophetic in the sense of movie time because Bangs died in 1982 of an accidental overdose of Darvon, Valium, and NyQuil.
Any fans of Almost Famous? Join us in comments to discuss arguably the best movie Cameron Crowe has written. And thanks once again to Jason for another great post! You may follow him on Twitter: @A2Jason.
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