It's 1991, and up on the big screen, a shabbily dressed young man with an ashen complexion steps out on a two-lane highway that stretches out to the horizon. The young man grunts, his eyes roll back into his head, he collapses, his body twitching in spasms. What appears to be a dramatic death rattle is in fact a cinematic bait-and-switch. Director Gus Van Sant is using a sly gambit to introduce rising boy star and fellow Oregonian River Phoenix as the decade's queer poster-boy, the narcoleptic Portland gay-for-pay boy hustler Mike Waters. The character, based on a real rent-boy friend of Van Sant's, will up-end bygone images of chic twinks, LGBT demonstrators storming outside NYC's Stonewall bar, and the downcast icks of Mart Crowley's Boys in the Band.
Welcome to the opening salvo of the New Queer Cinema, as every art-film house becomes the stage for many a bumpy night. By the end of the decade, the LGBT community will have crossed the River Jordan with a real-life martyr, Wyoming's Matt Shepard. But River Phoenix's extraordinary performance is bolstered by the young actor's determination to disappear into the role: appearing for work in the Boys Town section of downtown Portland, apparently having not bathed for weeks, and having mastered the narcoleptic seizures of his character, the spasmodic jerks and writhing that would, two years hence, seem more than a little ironic as the beautiful young actor died on a cold LA sidewalk following a drug overdose at Hollywood's aptly named Viper Room.
It's Halloween weekend in the Castro, 1993, and had you asked me who was the fairest movie lad of all in that first autumn of the Clinton years, I would have replied, "River Phoenix, of course!" It had been just over two months since this shape-shifting imp, born to a vegan family in an Oregon log cabin, had celebrated his 23rd birthday (Aug. 23). The buzz was running like lava from Pompeii: next up, a guest slot opposite Tom Cruise in the eagerly awaited Neil Jordan film of Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire; then Van Sant beckoned with the opportunity for Phoenix to dazzle as the young Andy Warhol. After that, sunshine and lollypops extending out to the horizon, with Oscars a mere matter of luck and timing. Suddenly, a filmmaker buddy bursts into the queer bookshop where I pull double Sunday shifts. "River Phoenix died last night. They think it was drugs."
In the 21 years since the night of Phoenix's death outside the Viper Room, there's been a fair amount of useless handwringing about drugs in the La-La fast lanes. In a rare grace note, Phoenix's family declined to seek out the identity of the young musician friend who handed him his lethal speedball cocktail with the words, "This will make you feel fabulous." The young actor had become a veritable poster-boy for clean living, telling the media that he had celebrated his 21st birthday with carrot juice, criticizing an actress playing his on-screen mom for having a Diet Coke. But he made a telling confession in his last recorded words. Between spasms, Phoenix was said to have glanced up from the sidewalk and pleaded with his brother, "No paparazzi. I want anonymity."
Gavin Edwards, author of the recent volume on Phoenix's meteoric rise and fall Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind, speculates that had the young actor been rushed to a nearby hospital ER, he might have been saved. Instead, image preservation triumphed over common sense. Of all the friends who knew and loved him, perhaps the wisest quote comes from his two-time on-screen and real-life girlfriend Martha Plimpton. "He was just a boy, a very good-hearted boy who was very fucked up and had no idea how to implement his good intentions."
In a film column, the last word belongs to a look at River Phoenix's great twin masterpieces.
My Own Private Idaho (1991) Van Sant's unique mix of auto-bio, Shakespearean-style rent-boy hijinks, including a first act when Phoenix's Mike Waters gets a bj from a hungry john, is not every queer fan's cup of tea. But there's no questioning the astonishing, vivid portrayal of a lost boy turned in by Phoenix at the pinnacle of his game. Gone is the vegan-boy media hype, and present is a prodigy actor who rarely had a false moment on screen. The Criterion DVD comes with a lovely remastering of the film, plus about four hours of extra disc features.
Running on Empty (1987) This Sidney Lumet-directed anthem to the twilight of the New Left features a 7-year-old Phoenix as the musically gifted oldest son of a family on the run. Danny Pope's parents (Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti) blew up a Federal weapons lab in the early 1970s, and in the film's present tense a decade and a half later, are still paying the price as fugitives, surviving on the kindness of an underground movement of strangers.
The strain that the "sins" of the parents inflict on Danny and his young brother make for a singularly moving piece of filmmaking. Seeing Phoenix explaining to his girlfriend (Plimpton) why he can't abandon his folks for a normal life left me freshly moist-eyed, awestruck and heartbroken at this terrible loss.