Picture that movie in Portland, Oregon, hometown of writer-director Van Sant, filmed among the real-life men and boys on the streets and sharing in their stories, but with empathy, not condescension. But it stars Keanu Reeves! Picture, if you can, the likes of Reeves and Phoenix, both stars on the rise - Reeves was fresh off of filming Point Break - signing on to a movie about teenage male hustlers. My Own Private Idaho makes me nostalgic for a time when queer cinema’s mere existence was truly radical, before we could pat ourselves on the back for consuming or making it, before queerness had become mainstream enough to attract the cultural capital that comes dog-eared with mandatory concessions to straight audiences. Van Sant’s approach comes off as natural and lived in, warm rather than academic. His own art is a symptom of both trends, which might explain why a movie like My Own Private Idaho now registers as a strange artifact, off-kilter and unusual but not quite avant-garde. Van Sant grew up in a wild era for cinema, amid an explosion of radical underground movies by the likes of Andy Warhol, but also on the cusp of New Hollywood. On the 25th anniversary of its release, it reminds us of the risks Hollywood’s periphery used to take, and of the stakes that even a not explicitly political movie often had ascribed to it. My Own Private Idaho is a wistful, delicate hybrid, a movie that does more than it could possibly seem to be doing at once. But it also became an essential meditation on desire between men, made at a time when Hollywood and its neighboring industries didn’t quite know what to do with that desire. In the hands of its stars, Phoenix and Keanu Reeves (Scott), it became all of these things. It’s a tale of teenage hustlers, boys who get paid to sleep with men, mostly because they have to, sometimes simply because they can a road movie that hops from Portland, Oregon, to Idaho and all the way to Rome a documentary with interviews of Portland’s real-life street hustlers speckled throughout and a riff on Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Even without this tinge of unfulfilled romance, My Own Private Idaho is already, on paper, too many films at once. He made the whole character that way.”Īnd the whole movie.
“River makes it more like he’s attracted to his friend, that he’s really in love with him. “Sex was something that he traded in, so he had no real sexual identity.” But Mike was played by River Phoenix, an actor who, in retrospect, seems beholden to the pain he brought to every role. “The character of Mike was originally kind of asexual,” Van Sant has said. It wasn’t originally in the cards for Mike to be in love with Scott - or for this scene to become a gentle, yearning act of confession, or for the movie to become an unrequited romance. This is one of the most famous moments in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, in part because of how natural and vulnerable it feels. “I’d like to talk with you,” the sensitive Mike half-whispers.
One of them poor and the other rich, one intrigued by the idea of a normal life, the other eyeing normalcy in his rear-view mirror. Two figures poking at a fire on the side of the open desert road, one named Mike Waters and the other Scott Favor. “Getting away from everything feels good,” one of them says, his face flush with glowing embers.