Few people noticed Cameron Crowe when he attended the last Broadway preview of Almost Famous, a musical based on the movie he wrote and directed, partially based on his last teen’s years. There in the audience, he politely, if tangentially, answered one question.

“How much involved were you with this version?” he was asked.

“I love the cast,” he replied.

Almost Famous (2000), winner of two Golden Globes – for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and for Kate Hudson for Best Supporting Actress – among four nominations, also won one Academy Award (Best Original Screenplay) for Cameron. And it took home the 2001 Grammy Award for Best Compilation Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media.

Considered one of the movie classics of the beginning of this century, it was ranked the 71st greatest film of all time by a Hollywood Reporter magazine’s list in 2014.

It tells the story of a teenage wannabe journalist touring with the fictitious rock band Stillwater, and his efforts to get his first cover story published by Rolling Stone magazine in the early 1970s. The film is semi-autobiographical: Crowe himself began his career as a teenage writer for that publication.

Almost Famous is a drama, a comedy and a musical: a story of family, coming-of-age, rock & roll, fame, infidelity and friendship. Set in 1973, it awakens nostalgia for those days before the Internet, social media, even computers and cell phones, when journalism was a more difficult and more influential job – therefore sometimes involving ethical dilemmas – and human connections had to made be face to face. Coincidentally or not, it was in the summer of 1973 that President Richard Nixon was facing the Watergate scandal, whose extent was revealed by an investigation in The Washington Post.

Now, 22 years after its Hollywood premiere, Almost Famous has been reborn as a Broadway show, with music by Tom Kitt, a book by Crowe, and lyrics by both of them. However, a large proportion of its songs are covers. The musical is directed by Jeremy Herrin, after five years of work, a time lengthened by some pandemic-induced delays.

Broadway appeared to be the musical’s natural home, and the New York show has mostly the same cast as when it started out in 2019 in San Diego, the hometown of the leading character and his strong-willed mother, a character based on Crowe’s real-life mother.

“A love letter to music!” Shirley Halperin described it for Variety in that regional opening in the autumn of 2019. “Destined to conquer Broadway! Cameron Crowe’s coming-of-age rock tale burns bright. Shimmering and mesmerizing, it’s an entrancing tapestry of sound. The chaotic, communal spirit of ’70s rock distilled in a musical,” Charles McNulty added for the Los Angeles Times.

But the reviews on Broadway have been the opposite. “I’m sorry to say that despite the intelligence of the 2000 movie on which it’s based, and the track record of its creators, the stage musical misses every opportunity to be the sharp, smart entertainment it might have been. In retelling the story of a 15-year-old who gets sucked prematurely into the world of bands and groupies and roadies and drugs, it lands instead in a mystifying muddle, occasionally diverting but never affecting. It needn’t have been that way; the source material is rich. But perhaps because the story is semi-autobiographical, Cameron Crowe, who wrote and directed the movie, apparently saw little reason to rethink it for the stage,” wrote Jesse Green for The New York Times last week.

The Washington Post’s headline by critic Peter Marks was also blunt: “The new musical ‘Almost Famous’ is not even almost great.”

Nevertheless, Crowe seemed to be happy in a podcast interview with Rolling Stone. “It didn’t feel like a modern movie, but it didn’t feel like a nostalgia trip, either. I wanted the musical to have a similar elixir to it,” he said last month. “I do have a sentimental feeling about 1973. I feel like that’s the year where things definitely started to change … I’ve never done a sequel or any of that stuff, but I do feel strongly that we had a chance to tell a story about a time and place, and that’s why I’m there every night.”

Comparisons are always bittersweet, especially between books, movies and stage. It seems that most people had fond memories from the film Almost Famous and were looking forward to a great Broadway adaptation. Others, who do not know the movie, might have a better time discovering it as a musical.