Back in the ‘80s, Tim Hunter was the go-to auteur of alienated youth. His 1986 film River’s Edge, out now on Blu-ray, was a low-budget exploration of dead-end kids in a nowhere town. It was Rebel Without a Cause for the Reagan era, a coming of age picture with indie cred. It also boasted a pair of stars-in-the-making, Keanu Reeves and Crispin Glover.
River’s Edge unfolds in a bleak teenage wasteland somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. We meet Samson (Daniel Roebuck) sitting with the lifeless body of his girlfriend, Jamie, naked and pale on the banks of a dreary rushing river, staring with blank blue eyes. He looks like an overgrown boy caught in the cookie jar, and with scarcely more remorse than a kid stealing a snack between meals. He readily admits his crime to his high school friends and takes them to see the body. Only sensitive Matt (Reeves) and sultry Clarissa (Ione Skye) seem bothered. Most of the kids shrug. Layne (Glover), the de facto ringleader because of his high-tension wire speed-freak energy, is determined to hide the body and protect Samson. If he has values, they are a twisted sense of loyalty to those he calls friends. However, Clarissa worries that if Samson could kill once, he could kill again.
Matt is the slacker with a conscience. As the protector of his toddler sister from their bad-seed 12-year sibling, Tim, Matt is set up from the start as the character most likely to do the right thing. Tim is a tiny bundle of premeditated cruelty. Their single mom is hapless, and they share the house with her boyfriend, a loud-mouthed and violent jerk. It’s a hard world to grow up in.
Drugs permeate the air, although the only explicit drug use is pot smoking. The best weed can be had at the secluded, ramshackle house inhabited by a one-legged ex-biker called Feck. Dennis Hopper plays him in crazy mode, living out sexual fantasies with an inflatable doll and packing a revolver.
A subtext for River’s Edge is the contrast between the ‘80s and the ‘60s, the slackers on one hand and a pair of countercultural leftovers on the other. Feck is among the latter; although delusional and a killer, he has one thing over the flat-lined Samson—he once was able to feel deeply. The other is a social studies teacher who drones on about how “we took it to the streets and made a difference.” Apathy is not his problem, but nostalgia.
Spoiler alert: all is not lost and redemption is possible. But the lasting impression of River’s Edge is the moral apathy of a flannel-clad generation growing up without heroes or direction. Grunge was just around the bend.
