River's Edge ('86)

John: I figure once you start fighting, you're always defending yourself. Me, I get in a fight, I go fucking crazy, you know, everything goes black, and then I fucking explode, you know, like it's the end of the world, and who cares if this guy wastes me, 'cause I'm gonna waste him first. And the whole world is gonna blow up anyway. I might as well keep my pride. I got this philosophy: do shit, and then it's done, and then you die. (finishes beer with a chug, belches). You got any more beer?

A movie like this a guy like me should have seen a long time ago. River's Edge blow-jobbed my heart: it's a poker-faced thriller that ticks all the b-movie boxes. Small-town white-trash airhead teenagers in denim jackets (wacked-out Layne, Crispin Glover, and brooding-cool Matt, Keunu Reeves, most of all) grip with matters of death and kinship, to the backdrop of broken homes and "sixers."

It begins with a black-and-white image of a river. Color fades in over opening credits -- but the contrast feels minor, a grey feeling lingers. The camera pans to a boy:

And what one already sensed feels confirmed by his dour face: this movies has a troubled and dreary pebble in its shoe.

The aesthetics convey the movie's interior reality and add a touch of poetry, a splash of melancholy.

Everything's a little muted. There's a buzzing, in-air sensation that the movie's central death is a single point in a long series of miseries and failures. It's the aesthetic equivalent to a person hanging onto a ledge by their slipping fingers.

Clarissa: You didn't have to call me a stupid bitch.

Layne: You would've driven right past us, we had to yell something.

Matt: You yelled it Layne.

Clarissa: I've got a name you know. You're lucky I didn't just drive right home.

Layne: Okay okay okay, I'm sorry. Clarissa. But you've got to understand that in a time like this, where every fucking second counts, a man can't waste his time choosing words.

River's Edge feels like it exists in life, and the narrative reality is a thing the characters deal with and process on their own terms. The different ways the characters respond to the tragedy and the way their responses reflect back on their unique personalities gifts the movie with the traction of unpredictability. Characters don't behave as if they're motivated by a screenplay's sense of urgency -- their responses feel detached, undetermined. There's a sense they can't always sort their feelings.

Feck: I killed a girl once, it was no accident. Put the gun right to the back of her head, blew her brains right out the front. I was in love.

John: I strangled mine.

Feck: Did you love her?

John: She was okay.

Tim: My fucking brother. Go get your nunchuks and your dad's car. I know where we can get a gun.

The perspectives fragment the ideas into a spectrum: Feck (Dennis Hopper), a paranoid older man who sells pot and has a blow-up doll gf named Elle, is cracked, John (Daniel Roebuck) is headed there; Matt and Layne search for ways to not end there, in their conflicting ways; Tony and Maggie live in a special oblivion, their feelings only vaguely connected to the event; Clarissa is somewhere near the middle of everything; younger brother Tim sits right outside the whole affair, but watches it and absorbs it with a child's eyes.

Layne: Why you two such delinquents.

Tim: 'Cause of our fucked-up childhood.

Really gorgeous, effervescent cinematography by Frederick Elmes, who'd shot Eraserhead and Valley Girl, and would shoot Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Night on Earth, The Ice Storm, Ride with the Devil, Storytelling, Broken Flowers, Synecdoche New York, and Bride Wars. But the fact that River's Edge and Blue Velvet appear to have been shot within a year's span feels amazing.

Mom: Where's Tim?

Layne: Outside being worthless. Why do you let him hang around with that hoodlum?

Mom: Why do I let him? What am I gonna do? Why do I let you smoke dope in the house? Where did you get that anyway?

Layne: Don't worry it's not yours.

Director Tim Hunter wrote the screenplay for the earlier disgruntled-youth movie Over the Edge, which movie introduced the talents of Matt Dillon. In River's Edge there are some of the finest actors of that period, and they all give great performances. Crispin Glover, Keanu Reeves, and Dennis Hopper especially. The script by Neal Jimenez pops with the verve and wit of cinema, somehow without intruding on the characters' realities. It's a fine script and I'd like to see other movies written by him.

The movie doesn't have a weak spot. And it's tough not to see it as a prophet of so many Gen-X movies that followed.