Kentucky Fried Movie

Dunst, who first impressed Crowe when she was a runner-up for Kate Hudson's role in Almost Famous, felt an immediate kinship with her character. She was cast early, after a typical Crowe audition, in which he played the music he'd picked out for the film to see how she responded to it and, more important, how the music sounded played against her image in close-up. ''You have this video camera in your face and I would react to different songs he would play,'' recalls Dunst, who rarely auditions but agreed because of Crowe's indelible female characters. ''Cameron wrote a beautiful role. She's messy, wise, and sad. And the words came easily to me.''

While shooting, Crowe played music to help the actors access the characters' emotions. It's a technique the director hit upon courtesy of Tom Cruise. ''We were doing the scene where Jerry Maguire's writing the mission statement and I started playing this song by His Name Is Alive and Tom was like, 'Keep it playing!' and he acted to the song and it was great,'' recalls Crowe, who appointed his assistant to be the on-set DJ, playing mostly Jeff Buckley and Simon and Garfunkel for Bloom, and Rilo Kiley and Rufus Wainwright for Dunst. Still, there are risks involved: Play the wrong song and the mood is dead. ''Kirsten came hard with her own opinions on what should be playing,'' Crowe says. ''I put on the Monkees and Kirsten just stopped and said, 'I can't do this.' She's a really hardcore music fan so sometimes it felt like being her DJ.''

Though Crowe puts on a brave face and says he doesn't give much power to Elizabethtown's naysayers, he reveals flashes of vulnerability when defending his movie as if it were his child who just got beat up after school. ''This movie is definitely a populist film, not created for cynics,'' says the director, who insists that non-industry audiences have responded positively in test screenings. ''It's the nature of this one that it's tough to get all the pieces right.... And you saying something is a 'work-in-progress' is like handing everybody a red pencil and saying, 'What are your notes?'''

Even after Toronto, Paramount, the studio releasing Elizabethtown, has refrained from the usual panicked meddling. ''Reviews are what they are. You live with them, hopefully learn from them, and move on,'' says Gail Berman, president of Paramount Pictures. ''We're on the same message since we began. The populist reaction to the movie is overwhelming. We're going on this journey with [Crowe] and believing in this process.'' In other words, Crowe has final cut.

In the new version, Crowe says he's honing the focus on Bloom's character and trimming the memorial scene, in which Sarandon's character busts out with an odd stand-up comedy routine. ''It's going to be 18 minutes shorter,'' he says. ''I cut down a lot of the goodbyes toward the end. There were two choices about how to do the movie: as a double or a long single CD. The way it was shot suggested you could make it more of a spell-creating experience [where] you go through some of this stuff almost in real time.''

Crowe, a self-described ''warrior for optimism,'' continues to battle what feels to him like an encroaching tide of cynicism, insisting that moviegoers, the real people, have got his back. His bus arrives at the theater and he is greeted by three little girls holding a banner that says ''Welcome Back to E-Town. Small town. Big heart. Just like you!'' He smiles and waves. For now, at least, his instincts are confirmed: This is humanity putting its best foot forward. The besieged protagonist of this story has found the warm embrace of an audience primed to love his movie, right here where it was born when he came to say goodbye to his father for the final time 16 years ago. ''I like that someone might come up to me and say, 'Did the father die to save his son's life?' It sure beats sitting around in a room with buddies, going, 'How do we do the heist movie for the millionth time?''' Crowe says, before stepping off the bus. ''This movie chose me. And if it works out that I get slaughtered for a movie that came from my heart, I can live with myself.''