Best Keanu: “I came into this thing screaming and kicking. I’m going out the same way.”

About 52 minutes into Permanent Record, the character of Lauren asks Chris Townsend, played by Keanu Reeves, “what happens when we die?”

Watching the film in 2022, you half expect Chris to look at Lauren, breathe out deeply, and say, “I know that the ones who love us, will miss us.”

But of course, this isn’t the Keanu Reeves of 2019 — it’s not Keanu Reeves at all, but a character he played when he was about 24 years old. So Chris Townsend just looks at Lauren and shrugs.

There’s some real depth in Permanent Record. It’s about a tough topic: those left behind by suicide. The characters in this film maybe didn’t all love David Sinclair, the young man who’s passed away. They don’t necessarily miss him, either. But they are all largely consumed with trying to figure out what happened.

The film does a nice job of exploring the emotions of David’s friends and classmates as they deal with their own grief. It does a less believable job when it comes to David’s parents, who seem oddly neither grief-stricken nor in shock. The objective of the film is to propel the arc of the teenagers, Chris in particular.

In this way, the film isn’t a true exploration of how suicide can impact a community; rather it’s about how it affects a select group of young folk.

It’s a bit dated in its depiction of how authority figures might respond to such an event. In Permanent Record, Chris and others want to have a memorial for their friend. The principal at first agrees; soon, an administrator says no, claiming it might make a hero out of the dead teenager, inappropriate given how he died. It’s hard to imagine any present-day high school administrator objecting to any such service for a deceased student, regardless of the nature of their passing.

There are some instantly recognizable faces in this movie: Barry Corbin and Dakin Matthews specifically. There’s also a not-grieving-enough-to-be-believable Kathy Baker, who plays David’s mother. Seeing her made me long for an episode of Picket Fences. I haven’t seen that show in a very, very, very long time, but I used to love it.

Lou Reed also has a cameo in this movie, which makes you wonder if this is when Keanu got his autograph. Joe Strummer of The Clash did most of the songs on the soundtrack.

But the standout of Permanent Record really is Keanu Reeves. His character looks a lot like Ted “Theodore” Logan, who would be on-screen for the first time the following year; but in Permanent Record Keanu isn’t playing dumb. In one scene, a drunk Chris cries to David’s father, “I should have been the one to keep him from jumping.” It’s raw, awkward, and emotional — exactly how something like that would play out in real life. It’s easy to see in this film Keanu’s trajectory to cinematic icon.

August 2022