Dakota Fanning Unapologetically Loves This Movie | Sorry Not Sorry
Coming-of-age stories tend to follow a familiar path. Someone young gets access to a world they've been dreaming about since childhood, and the experience either confirms who they thought they were or pushes them in an entirely different direction. So, it's sort of serendipitous that Dakota Fanning, who began her acting career as a child, would pick 2000's Almost Famous as her favorite movie.
WATCH: Dakota Fanning Unapologetically Loves This Movie
Speaking to JustWatch while promoting the 2026 drama film The Sun Never Sets, Fanning didn't have to think too hard about her go-to re-watch favorite. "I watch Almost Famous over and over again religiously," she said, before adding, "But everyone knows how good that one is." And she's not wrong. Despite failing at the box office, the film was praised by critics and even bagged some awards.
While it's not billed as a coming-of-age story, Almost Famous follows teen journalist William Miller (Patrick Fugit), whose work gets noticed by the editor of Rolling Stone. Impressed with his writing, the magazine eventually sends William on tour with a rock band, with the story set to be featured in a future edition. But no one realizes how young William actually is until he is on assignment.
The Link Between Fanning's Career And 'Almost Famous'
Fanning's own career started similarly. She was working alongside adults at just five years old, which meant getting tossed into environments that required a level of composure that some grown-ups fail to master. Films like I am Sam (2001) and Man on Fire (2004) placed her in stories with heavy material, which must have impacted her in some way.
Despite being so young, Fanning was never typecast in kid roles because she was so good at bringing her characters to life. Similarly, William in Almost Famous is eventually taken seriously because of what he can do, not because of how old he is. But unlike Fanning, getting a front-row seat to the world of rock and roll is not everything he thought it would be.
What Almost Famous lays out isn't a story about getting somewhere because William is already there. The whole thing is more about learning that your heroes are just ordinary people with real flaws. And while that might be jarring (or even a little disappointing) at first, it just confirms that no matter our status in the world, we are all simply doing our best.
In the end, William doesn't regret the experience, despite a major betrayal from a person he thought he could trust. He just sees things more clearly and eventually manages to live out his dreams as a writer. The same thing applies more broadly in the real world. The closer you get to the thing you've built up in your head, the more you notice when things aren't the way they seemed from the outside.
Why To Watch 'Almost Famous' (And What To Watch After)
The best thing about Almost Famous is its sincerity. The film moves through William's experience without trying to turn it into some massive epiphany because that's not how real life works at all. The music and the setting all do their part, but the throughline is how unstable everything feels, and that most people will change their behavior depending on the situation they're in.
A good follow-up is 2019's Yesterday, which tackles a similar idea from a different angle. The film follows Jack Malik (Himesh Patel), a struggling musician who wakes up to find that he's the only person on Earth who remembers The Beatles. Using their music, he builds the career he hadn't been able to establish on his own. But his success eventually becomes hard to separate from the conditions that created it.
Like Almost Famous, the access Jack gains only introduces a different set of questions. Things like authorship and whether the version of success he's choosing to claim actually belongs to him, since he had no part in its creation. The tone is lighter, but the underlying message isn't far removed. Both films focus on what happens when what's on the other side doesn't match what you expected.
