For his third feature film, writer/director Gus Van Sant was finally able to bring to the screen a story he had been trying to tell for years about Portland street hustlers. His critical and commercial success with Drugstore Cowboy (1989) had made him a name in the burgeoning American independent film scene of the early 1990s, giving him just enough clout to make the projects he wanted to make. The resulting film, My Own Private Idaho, is a unique, poetic work of great intimacy and sadness. Filled with lyrical imagery and a tone both poignant and gritty, it is alternately funny, touching, and disheartening, and to top it all off, parts of it are adapted from Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V, right down to the use of iambic pentameter in the dialogue.

Although Van Sant had originally wanted to fill the entire cast with actual Portland hustlers, many of whom he had become friends with over the years, he ended up casting the main roles with two young stars, River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves. At the time, Phoenix was truly coming into his own, mixing up serious roles in films such as The Mosquito Coast (1986) and Running on Empty (1988) with lighter fare like A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon (1988) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). Phoenix had always been a brooding teen idol, more James Dean than Tom Cruise, and his role as a narcoleptic gay teenage prostitute in My Own Private Idaho helped solidify his credibility as a serious actor willing to take risky roles over covers on Teen Beat.

The casting of Keanu Reeves was a little more chancy, as he was so deeply associated at the time with the stoned slacker-heroes of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1988), a persona he had perfected with more serious intention in Ron Howard’s Parenthood (1989). It was easy to forget, though, that he had first made his mark with a powerful performance as a disaffected teenager in moral crisis in Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge (1986). Throughout the years, Reeves has been slammed by many for his supposed inability to act, and it is true that some of his roles have had a strangely wooden quality. However, anyone who professes that he has no talent needs to see him here, as his performance as a privileged mayor’s son turned prostitute is revelatory. In fact, Reeves has one of the film’s best (and most subtle) performative moments near the end, when his character sits at one funeral and watches another, his face a steely and complex mixture of both contempt and envy.

Much of My Own Private Idaho was adapted from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, with Reeves’ Scott Favor playing the Prince Hal character, a young man deliberately and obstinately running from his father’s expectations only to turn around in the end and embrace them (a plot turn derived from Henry V). The Falstaff character is Bob Pigeon (William Richert), a former hustler and thief who lords over a motley bunch of street kids who look up to him as some kind of father figure.

Scott’s best friend is Mike Waters (Phoenix), a fellow hustler who doesn’t have a privileged background. Rather, he is a young man looking for his home, where he also hopes to find his identity. While Scott has deliberately chosen his place in life, Mike seems to have fallen into his, and his narrative trajectory deals with his search for his roots, specifically his mother who left many years earlier. Although Mike runs with the same crowd as Scott, he appears to be on the margins of the marginalized. He is also secretly in love with Scott, which means that his best friend is but one more emotional connection he might be denied. Mike is thus the film’s tragic figure, particularly when the narrative winds to its third act and Scott finds romance with an Italian girl (Chiara Caselli) and assumes his place in the upper crust. Mike’s narcolepsy also plays into his tragedy, as he unwittingly goes to sleep during stressful moments, making his life a confused puzzle of too many missing pieces.

My Own Private Idaho has a somewhat meandering narrative, and at times Van Sant breaks off from the main story to focus on the lives of the street kids. The film is ultimately about life on the streets, with Mike and Scott being only two drops in a much larger body of experience. Although he couldn’t cast the main roles with actual hustlers, Van Sant does fill out the cast with kids from the streets of Portland, which adds a subtle authenticity to the film. The grittiness they bring contrasts sharply with Van Sant’s poetic imagery, particularly his dreamlike use of time-lapse photography.

Nothing is quite off limits aesthetically, but Van Sant’s wide-ranging artistic openness feels more like a concentrated vision that a random pastiche. Some of his more daring conceits—like having the front covers of gay porn magazines literally come alive—work because they are situated so comfortably in a cinematic canvas in which anything goes. Yet, Van Sant never lets the imagery and style overwhelm the characters and their plights. The imagery of My Own Private Idaho is what you remember immediately afterwards, but its emotional intimacy and raw honesty are what make it unforgettable.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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