Best Keanu: “This idea of helping John out… is not a good idea.”

My much younger friend and co-worker, when I told her I’d spent the previous night watching River’s Edge, Googled the film during a slow period on shift.

“The only person I recognize,” she said, scrolling through the headshots of the cast members, “is him,” and tapped Keanu’s face.

Which isn’t altogether surprising. If you were 12 years old in 1986, as I was, you would know Crispin Glover immediately. Back to the Future was fresh in our minds. You wouldn’t yet know Ione Skye or Keanu Reeves, but that would happen in short order. Dennis Hopper might still be a name from a different generation, but he wouldn’t be wholly unfamiliar either.

In 2022, however, a lot of those names are lost to cinematic history. Or don’t commonly graze the consciousness of people born in 1996 instead of 1974.

But in order to enjoy River’s Edge, I argue, that doesn’t really matter. I did not watch it until a sweltering hot evening in July 2022, as it was yet another film on The List of Keanu Reeves movies whose names were iconic but I had never seen, and after months of being behind on freelance work, emotional exhaustion, and an unpredictably stressful summer, I had an evening totally free without the weight of worries on my mind.

I’d told that co-worker the day before — we work together at what I call my “fun job,” because it has high social perks — that I could finally go home and have nothing to do. So the next day she asked me what exciting thing I’d done, and I said I watched a movie called River’s Edge, that was an iconic controversial film of my childhood that I’d never seen.

You could say the movie felt real to me because it is steeped in my generation, because those kids seemed familiar and, in some sense, were us. But even more so, River’s Edge holds up some 36 years later because of the strength of its story.

That story still resonates because River’s Edge exercises deep restraint in conveying a moral lesson, which means today’s audiences can draw from it an entirely different theme than did audiences in 1986 — and perhaps a different lesson than the filmmakers intended.

In River’s Edge, a teenager murders his girlfriend. He tells his friends — or more precisely, they gradually find out, and visit the body, lying at the edge of the river — and they keep quiet. There’s no pact, no nefarious plan to keep their friend’s deed a secret. They just go about their lives, at least at first. When one of them finally tells, they continue to stay silent about what they know.

There are glimpses of the kids’ home lives, that of Keanu’s character — who is the first to tell — most thoroughly. The film seems to want to say these kids are untethered and therefore without a moral compass. They don’t have solid family structures, little guidance, do a lot of drugs, and are witness to and have access to weapons of violence.

In 1986, River’s Edge could have been about the decline of the American family, or poverty, or whatever social ill you could draw from the circumstances in which these kids find themselves.

In 2022, River’s Edge is about all of us, or any of us. It’s about how often we draw our moral compass not from religion or upbringing, but from each other. We do what’s socially acceptable to our immediate group. The person who defies the group is the rare person willing to disrupt the social convention, and that person is still rare even when the social convention is harmful, dangerous, and immoral.

Keanu Reeves would have been about 22 when this film was shot. It’s high on my list of great performances of his, which came as a surprise; you wouldn’t think such a young Keanu would do more than just rely on his presence. But there’s a real depth to his acting, as with all members of this cast.

River’s Edge is a special film. More people should know it exists.

Side note: In this interview Keanu and Winona Ryder did in 2018 for their very entertaining film Destination Wedding, Winona said she wanted to audition for River’s Edge, but her parents wouldn’t let her because of a “sexy sex scene.” I assume this is the scene where Keanu and a young Skye — who would have been about 16 at the time — get intimate inside a sleeping bag in a park. It’s somehow a relief it wasn’t Winona in that role, because — well, it just is. As with all (most) things River’s Edge, maybe it just came together exactly as it should have.

August 2022