River Phoenix's brief life was a series of contradictions: a teen star
without opening a single movie; part of a missionary family set to take
Hollywood by storm (see also Rain and Joaquin); clean-living vegan
political campaigner who died of a heroin overdose. He started out
playing sons – to Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and Running On Empty –
and was still playing disaffected teenagers when he died. Even as a
junkie rent boy in My Own Private Idaho, he brought a nostalgic, golden
boy glow to the screen. The film shows he has talent beyond the myth of
living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpus of work.
