Every Crowe movie from Jerry Maguire onwards worries over the exact same scenario: a man who’s important in his field experiences failure and must rebuild.* Crowe was obsessed by the possibility of failure long before he actually failed (at least in terms of commercial performance and critical perception—again, I’m a fan) and the movies became a self-fulfilling prophecy. This tremendous fear of overreach and being leveled by hubris has big "gifted and talented kid meets world" energy behind it, which checks out: when you hit what, objectively, is your first big peak at age 16 (when Crowe wrote his first cover story for Rolling Stone), it seems inevitable to obsess about how long it’ll be before the downward trajectory sets in.

More (to put it mildly) here.