Why Britney Spears’ ‘Crossroads’ Is a Lost Classic
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At long last, Crossroads is back. It’s the answer to a Britney Spears fan’s prayers. Britney’s 2002 movie-star showcase is finally returning to the big screen for two nights, on Oct. 23 and 25, to go with her new tell-all memoir, The Woman in Me, which drops on Oct. 24. Crossroads was a box-office smash at the time, but it’s been scandalously unavailable for years — most fans have never gotten the chance to see it since it’s not streaming anywhere. This movie has been hidden away for far too long. But, like Britney herself, it deserves a chance to break free.
Crossroads didn’t exactly turn out to be the dawn of a long silver-screen career. It’s the first and last time Britney ever took a real shot at acting, in the drama of three teenage friends taking a coming-of-age summer road trip from Georgia to Hollywood. It was the first movie Shonda Rhimes ever wrote, years before her Grey’s Anatomy breakthrough, directed by Tamra Davis. Britney’s BFFs were both future stars: Zoë Saldaña and Taryn Manning. And as her estranged parents: Dan Aykroyd and Kim Cattrall. Everything in Crossroads is deeply weird. But that’s why it’s a lost classic — the essence of le Cinéma du Britney.
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This reissue makes sense right now because it’s the ultimate “Britney Will Rise Again” statement. Since she’s got so many fair-weather fans right now, it’s worth noting that the film came at a time when our girl was the most controversial, most divisive, most hated figure in pop culture. But in Crossroads, nothing can stop her from her voyage of self-discovery. One of so many genius scenes: The girls’ car breaks down in Louisiana, so she decides to raise the money by entering a karaoke contest at a New Orleans bar, singing “I Love Rock & Roll.” The karaoke host is none other than old-school hip-hop legend Kool Moe Dee. Spoiler: She wins the contest, rocks the house, raises the cash, and learns life lessons.
The movie got trashed by many people, predictably, but some of us loved it. Rolling Stone called the “I Love Rock & Roll” scene “the most accurate portrait of America since The Bodyguard,” adding, “Britney is our national karaoke Cleopatra, the secret under our skins. We don’t fantasize about her, but about having her fantasies.” (OK, true, I wrote that. But was I wrong? Ah, no.)
In her new book, Britney reveals how she got lost in “Method acting” while making Crossroads. “The experience wasn’t easy for me,” she writes. “My problem wasn’t with anyone involved in the production but with what acting did to my mind. I think I started Method acting — only I didn’t know how to break out of my character. I really became this other person.… I didn’t have any separation at all.”
Britney felt herself getting possessed by the role. “I ended up walking differently, carrying myself differently, talking differently. I was someone else for months while I filmed Crossroads. Still to this day, I bet the girls I shot that movie with think, She’s a little …quirky. If they thought that, they were right.”
Britney plays a small-town Georgia high-school gal named Lucy. Her single dad, mechanic Dan Aykroyd, wants her to attend med school, but she must find herself. So she hops in a convertible to go West with two girlfriends. Plus, a boy at the wheel, a doe-eyed guitarist. One night, she opens up her diary and reads it to him, a poem she’s written called “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.” Will he set it to music because he’s secretly in love with her? Will she sing it as her big power-ballad theme song at a talent show in L.A.? Will she get discovered and taste the Cheetos-flavored nectar of fame? Yes, yes, and yes again.
But the film’s emotional demands were tough. Like that Hollywood girl named Lucky, Brit had more private heartache than anyone realized. “I watched it for the first time the other day,” she told Rolling Stone in 2001. “It was weird! I saw myself freakin’ cry on a big screen and I was like, ‘Oh, gosh.’ But then I got so wrapped up in the movie that I saw myself as a character and not as myself.” She identified hard with Lucy. “In a lot of ways, she’s similar to me — she’s very to herself and writes in her journal a lot. But when I watched it, I was like, ‘She’s kind of mean sometimes. And boring.’ I was like, ‘Am I like that in real life? Ew!’”
The experience didn’t leave her craving more. “That was pretty much the beginning and end of my acting career, and I was relieved,” she admits in The Woman in Me. “I hope I never get close to that occupational hazard again. Living that way, being half yourself and half a fictional character, is messed up. After a while you don’t know what’s real anymore.”
The most poignant scene: Britney knocks on the door of her birth mother, who abandoned her years ago. She turns out to be Kim Cattrall. Britney greets her with a smile that says, “Hi, Mom! It’s me, the long-lost daughter you pretend you never had! The secret nightmare you prayed you’d never face! What’s for dinner?” Shockingly, it doesn’t go well. This was Cattrall’s first big movie after her Sex and the City career resurgence — not to mention her brand new book, Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm. Love how Crossroads imagines a timeline where Aykroyd and Cattrall spawned Britney — both of them were movie stars in 1982, the year she was born. This means they would have had sex somewhere in between Porky’s and Doctor Detroit. (Kim’s real beau at the time: Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, a mere 37 years her senior. Face it, she would have made a cuter couple with Elwood Blues.)
When you watch Crossroads, it’s fascinating how most of the movie is just Britney and her girls singing along to the radio. That’s when we see Britney at her realest. It begins in her bedroom, as she lip-syncs to Madonna’s “Open Your Heart,” using a spoon as a microphone. (Guess she doesn’t own a hairbrush?) They rock out in the car to Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman,” with Brit really working her “Let’s go, girls!” They make their sunset L.A. entrance by belting Sheryl Crow’s “If It Makes You Happy.” They even bop to NSync’s “Bye Bye Bye,” a wink to her then-boyfriend Justin Timberlake, at a time when the couple were at the zenith of their “matching blue-denim VMAs fit” era. In the book, Britney roasts him like a s’more, accusing him of cheating on her.
Tamra Davis had directed Nineties gems like Guncrazy, CB4, and Billy Madison, as well as classic music videos like Sonic Youth’s “Bull in the Heather” and Hanson’s “MMMBop.” She gets the details of pop fandom right. As Davis told Vanity Fair, “To open the film with her dancing in her bedroom, and just the celebration of girl culture, that’s what we do — we close our bedroom door, we play around. I love that. To me, it’s my female gaze saying, ‘This is what girls are like.’”
Crossroads hits theaters at the same time as Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. But it’s fitting since Tay is such a Britney fan — when she played Louisiana in 2011, she sang “Lucky” as her local hero tribute to Kentwood’s Finest.
Crossroads is a mess, for sure. There’s a clumsy subplot about an unwanted pregnancy that is handled with a mind-blowing lack of empathy, like this is a 1950s soap opera or something. But it ends on a high note. Aykroyd arrives in L.A. to fetch his wayward daughter home, but he can only stand there and watch as she takes the stage. When she blows everyone away with “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,” he realizes this is where she belongs. Sure, right, it’s a blatant rip off the Dirty Dancing “Nobody puts Baby in a corner” scene. So what? It’s perfect. Crossroads turned out to be a one-shot fluke for her movie career. Yet it sums up her quintessential Brit-dom so perfectly that she didn’t really need to ever go back and try again. Crossroads proves that you can’t keep a good not-a-girl, not-yet-a-woman down.
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