There was a moment before I sat down to write this that I considered not being entirely truthful about who my film role model actually is. I might have said it is Eva Green in The Dreamers, wandering naked and smouldering through beautifully furnished Parisian rooms, or even Z-Man, in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, purely for a managing to pull off golden over-the-knee boots with such panache.
Yet, as is probably inevitable, it is sadly no one so cool. In fact, since the age of 10, the only film character I have ever had a desperate yearning to be is Patrick Fugit, playing the endearingly awkward wannabe rock critic William Miller in Almost Famous.
I first watched the film hidden behind a sofa in my living room, long after my unassuming parents thought I was asleep upstairs. Crouched in my clandestine spot between the radiator and upholstery, it is hard to exaggerate the pre-teen epiphany I had watching this nerdy teenager follow his music heroes on tour and subsequently witness the whole rock-star fantasy disintegrate before his eyes.
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God, how I wanted to be him. I wanted a crazed Lester Bangs played by the wonderful Philip Seymour Hoffman to turn up and start pelting Lou Reed records at my head. I wanted to be swept along on a rock tour, sing Tiny Dancer on a bus from Topeka, play scrabble with Humble Pie and look great in velvet flares. And then write about the whole damn thing.
But I also found a kindred spirit within this nerdy naive kid who idolised musicians, sat in his room listening to Cat Stevens and dreamed of having "mystique"– a quality I definitely still lack. William Miller somehow made being an intense, gawky teen with a music taste dictated entirely by my mum's dubious record collection seem OK. Cool even.
My admiration and desire to be William Miller did have its down side. He is the reason I spent much of my adolescence in solo pursuit of drug-addled musicians through urine-scented pub cellars, convinced (wrongly) as I was that bands such as the Libertines were the Stillwater of our time and Pete Doherty was nothing short of Billy-Crudup-as-Russell-Hammond incarnate.
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It did also mean that when I eventually came to interview my first musician, it was tinged with disappointment, when, instead of being on a tour bus bound for Nashville, I met them in a hotel lobby in Swindon. I came prepared to swig Jack Daniels from the bottle – instead I was handed a Sprite and some Highlands shortbread.
Yet, that film character is also genuinely what gave me my first push towards journalism. After watching it the second time, I started a bedroom fanzine in which I wrote album reviews of whatever I could get my hands on – an eclectic mix of Simon and Garfunkel, Billie Piper, Madonna in her cowboy phase and even, oddly, a very cutting piece on Julio Iglesias's greatest hits. Rolling Stone it was not, but it did attempt to subscribe to the golden piece of advice given to Patrick Fugit by Philip Seymour Hoffman – "be honest and unmerciful", a motto that has always stuck with me.
While I cannot claim my path into journalism has even vaguely mirrored William Miller's (the direct comparisons between 1960s downtown LA and late 1990s west London are limited at best), it offered what I still consider to be valuable insights into my chosen career.
I'll lay this right on you, just make us look cool" says Billy Crudup, playing the band's lead guitarist Russell Hammond, in one memorable scene.
"I will quote you warmly and accurately," replies Patrick Fugit.
"That's what I'm worried about" says Crudup.
Of course, I still hold out hope there are certain William Miller moments that could still be realised in my own life. I have, for example, never filed my copy from a hotel bath, surrounded by Post-it notes while women in underwear and scarves dance around me (sorry, by the way, if that destroys anyone's illusions about how things are done at the Guardian), but there's still time.
Indeed, I still watch go back and watch Almost Famous in my moments of crisis, partly for the impeccable soundtrack, but also to revisit some of the inspired nuggets of advice imparted by Philip Seymour Hoffman. "You cannot make friends with the rock stars," he tells Fugit. "These people are not your friends, these are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of rock" – though no rock star has ever attempted to befriend me, so I've yet to really utilise that particular gem.
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The most candid advice of all, however, is told to Miller at his lowest ebb. "The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool," Seymour Hoffman reassures my teary film hero. And 13 years after I first watched the film, those words have never rung so true.
• Why I'd like to be Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Why I'd like to be Nausicaä in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
• More from the Role model series
