Best Keanu: *standing in the background, looking like an extra

On its face, Youngblood is a pretty nothing film. It’s old, it’s got a standard plot, and it doesn’t contain any deep messages. In fact, if there’s a moral message in Youngblood, it’s a horrible one — more on that in a minute.

But Youngblood gets four stars because of its fascinating and brutal look at hockey culture, particularly in the late-80s. Not to mention the interesting details that make it a time capsule of what was acceptable in 1980s culture; not just on-screen, but in everyday life.

The Canadian-isms in this film, and the delightful glimpses of a very unpolished Keanu Reeves, are just the cherries on the top.

[*] Oh, Canada

Rob Lowe plays an American farm boy who wants to play hockey. So he leaves home for small-town Ontario, to play with a junior league team. In the car, he and his brother sing a 1980s (and later) version of O Canada, long before parliament changed the lyrics to our national anthem to make them gender-neutral.

Lowe’s character, Dean Youngblood, encounters a woman named Jessie, played by Cynthia Gibb. She’s the coach’s daughter and makes it clear she’s no Canadian — like Dean, she ended up in Canada after her father came to Ontario to take a job with the team.

The end of the film — indeed most of the film — includes extensive on-ice action, with the ads on the boards a glimpse into brands of the past. At the film’s violent climax, there’s a clear shot of a portrait of a young Queen Elizabeth II. There’s the old Apple logo, when Apple was best known for making personal computers.

But what stuck out for me was the back wall ad for Player’s cigarettes, the image of which is burned into my childhood memory. In retrospect, maybe that dousing of my visual field with Player’s branding was what led to my lifelong smoking obsession, which I detail at the end of this post. Although, in my older years, I craved not Player’s, but Du Maurier.

[*] We wouldn’t put that on screen today. Thank God.

The Player’s logo isn’t the only reference to smoking in Youngblood. In one scene, Dean and Jessie are in a convenience store, and there’s an easily-accessible container of individually-wrapped cigars available for sale on the counter. Dean and Jessie, both in high school, are out on their own late at night — common in the 1980s, less so today; at least on film.

Eventually Dean and Jessie have sex, in a quite explicit (and sweaty) scene. Earlier in the movie, we see Rob Lowe’s bare butt and a lot else as Jessie catches Dean outside the locker room in his jockstrap. Now, we see her bare breasts — which he douses with water — and hear her moans. Perhaps tame for a love scene in general, but since the characters are in high school, it is nothing short of gross.

As is the “comical” implication that Miss McGill — the house mistress of the boarding house where Dean and others reside — has sex with him and the other players under her care. This is one of Keanu’s few lines in the film, as he and another player peek through the doorway as Miss McGill “has her way” with Dean: “She do it to me last year, eh?” Keanu is faking a terrible Quebecois accent, and later wears a shirt that says “Laval.”

There’s also the underage drinking — bar hopping with shots — and Dean’s hazing by his other team members. They tape his mouth shut and (it’s implied) shave his pubic hair.

[*] Hockey is a rough and violent game. Even more so back then.

I don’t watch much hockey as an adult. But growing up, it was hard to escape, and the game’s television soundtrack of stick-against-puck and skate-against-ice and body-against-board is, to this day, soothing. It’s a faster game now, which hits you in the face while watching Youngblood. At first, I wasn’t sure whether to attribute the players’ slow movement on ice in the early scenes to the time period, or the fact that the actors involved didn’t know how to play hockey. Keanu was one of the exceptions — but you never see him in goal, and by the end of the movie the team has mysteriously switched to a different goalie, as if Keanu wandered off set in the middle of filming and just never came back.

But the core of Youngblood is not about speed or skill — it’s about young kids forced to sacrifice their physical health, sometimes permanently, because they are desperate to play the game. The team owners see them as nothing more than a commodity, a means to an end: winning. In short, the core of Youngblood is about violence. In the 80s, and to this day, fighting is an integral part of ice hockey. This is a sport that regularly hires enforcers — players tapped not for their skill at scoring goals, but rather, because they can fight. Dean Youngblood’s major failing as he tries to make an impact with his new team is not that he can’t move the puck, but rather, that he can’t throw a punch.

I feel like the game is less violent now, but I don’t watch it frequently enough to say for sure. North American hockey apparently sticks out because of its integration of violence into the game. It’s part of what happens on the ice, but there are rules, etiquette, and penalties.

That’s not to say hockey hasn’t had a reckoning in recent decades, not only for its violence by players, but against players over too many generations to count.

At the end of Youngblood, Dean becomes a hero for matching an opposing player, injury for injury, after that player seriously maimed his team mate and mentor, played by Patrick Swayze. The moral lesson is the easy one: an eye for an eye, even in hockey.

[*] There’s Keanu Reeves. But if you blink, you might miss him.

If you watch closely, it might make your day. Because at about 8:30 into the movie, there’s a quick shot of 5 members of the team in the stands, watching Dean Youngblood try out. On one end is Patrick Swayze; on the other is Keanu Reeves, doing some weird thing with his hands which, upon closer inspection, appears to be tossing a puck back and forth between his palms. He looks a little like a kid who can’t stand still, or an extra who won’t follow instructions. (As someone who has done many background gigs, I know the rule is to move only as much as the second A.D. tells you to.)

Soon after, there’s another scene where Patrick Swayze strides across the locker room, with other players, Keanu’s Heaver included, milling about. Watching, you almost have this strange instinct to freeze the movie, scream back in time to these actors, and to tell them to take note: “That’s Keanu Reeves! And on top of it, that’s Patrick Swayze! In the same shot! In five years, they’ll make a homoerotic bank robbing surfer film together called Point Break that becomes so iconic it will still have the occasional midnight in-theatre screening 31 years later!“

But we can’t reach back in time. Ironically, it would be Rob Lowe who would eventually learn how to surf after he turned 40. Patrick Swayze would move on from this world. And Keanu Reeves, who apparently couldn’t stand still, would become known as one of the industry’s greatest physical actors. Reeves’ talent for fight scenes shouldn’t surprise anyone — after all, he is Canadian, and grew up playing hockey.

August 2022