A film from 2000 about a 15-year-old boy (young man?) who blags his way into writing for Rolling Stone magazine (they don't know how old he is, and he fakes a deeper voice over the phone), and ends up on tour with the rock band Stillwater, developing substantive relationships with some members of the band and their hangers-on. One of these is a young woman called "Penny Lane" who is a member of a groupie cohort called the band-aids, and it's here that the film gets problematic. The hero calls out the band because he thinks they aren't kind enough to these girls, but there's no suggestion that he or anyone else thinks that there's anything abusive about sexual relationships between men in their twenties and girls in their mid-teens.
There's surprisingly little tension in the film - the hero is never really in trouble or in danger. The band's manager is supplanted by a cool dude appointed by the record company, but the old manager who has been with them since the beginning still stays on. And so on. Frances McDormand is nice as the boy's mother.
Watched on Amazon Prime.
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