“Don’t take drugs!” Frances McDormand’s character in Almost Famous hollers after she has deposited her son, 15-year-old aspiring rock writer William Miller (Patrick Fugit), at a raucous concert in Southern California in the early 1970s. Perhaps you had to have been a member of the Just Say No club at a tiny suburban private school in the early 1990s, as I was, to fully appreciate the weight of parental expectation that accompanies McDormand’s exhortation to her teenage journalist son in the movie, which recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. The film’s writer-director, Cameron Crowe, excavated his experience as an adolescent correspondent for Rolling Stone for the story. But it is to his credit that he honored both William’s aspirations (wanting to slough off his mother’s watchful eye and enter the real world) and his mother’s anxieties (seeking to steer her son away from assorted illicit behavior).

Simply put, Crowe is perhaps the most upstanding person to ever make a movie about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and his dual perspective is what makes Almost Famous endure. Even in September 2000, Almost Famous was this close to being an aberration: No one, back then, was writing obituaries for studio-financed, medium-budget comedy-dramas. But studio-financed, medium-budget comedy-dramas with so much good cheer and good taste were never plentiful. Cinematically speaking, Crowe seemed to model his sensibility on James L. Brooks (Broadcast News), whose patronage enabled him to make his striking debut film, 1989’s Say Anything, and his greatest commercial success, 1996’s Jerry Maguire, but who gave him something greater: a gift for dreaming up unhateable characters.