By Emily MaskellFeatures correspondent

Thirty years on, Gus Van Sant's masterpiece still astounds. With their tender performances, its two stars Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix reinvigorated the pinup ideal, writes Emily Maskell.

Keanu Reeves and the late River Phoenix were in their 20s when they starred in Gus Van Sant's 1991 cult classic My Own Private Idaho. The two actors were already well on their way to becoming household names when they diverted from Hollywood's well-trodden path to star in Van Sant's third feature: a queer, cult and unprecedented title in both Reeves and Phoenix's filmographies.

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This year marks the 30th anniversary of My Own Private Idaho, a loose adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV, and one of Van Sant's most quietly affecting titles. A moving and meditative character study, the film is an expedition of two young hustlers: Michael "Mike" Waters (River Phoenix), a narcoleptic vagabond yearning to feel the warm embrace of home, and the handsomely charming Scott Favor (Keanu Reeves), a mayor's son who is wayward and indulging in sex work as he awaits access to his bountiful inheritance. Part arthouse cinema, part unconventional road-trip movie, My Own Private Idaho makes for a pivotal – if not definitive – outlier in the pin-up lineage of Reeves and Phoenix's respective acting careers.

While My Own Private Idaho journeys from Portland to Idaho to Italy in search of Mike's mother, Van Sant's first stop is to spotlight the Hollywood heartthrobs in a whole new light. The first close-up glance viewers are granted of Phoenix is Mike's expression as he receives fellatio. The explicit moment precedes a barn house falling from the sky and smashing on to the wide, open road. Instantaneously, this teen idol sheds his poster-boy skin, and lurches towards the unconventionality of Van Sant's magisterial vistas of Idaho. 

With a liberal attitude towards sex, sex work, and queerness, Van Sant transposed the young gleaming Hollywood stars into his indie cinematic frame. But asking viewers to empathise with the potentially unfavourable queer, social-outcast sex workers was a risk for the actors. "In 1991, even 14 years before Brokeback Mountain, the conventional Hollywood wisdom was that it was career suicide for a leading man to be identified as gay," Gavin Edwards, author of Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind, tells BBC Culture. It is as if these two actors were outrunning the trappings of Hollywood fame by venturing out of the realm of heartthrob typecasting. 

The figure of the hustler – not the Richard Gere-type gigolo – serving a male clientele was not just outré, but also unconventional for mainstream 90s audiences. Midway through their journey, Scott and Mike meet one of their past customers, Hans (Udo Kier), at a hotel. After some passes in the lobby, the trio go to Hans's room and have a threesome that is shown with a mirage of quasi-stop-motion tableaux vivants. Van Sant's camera burrows at awkward angles with overlapping limbs and high-contrast shadows.

Van Sant's arthouse cinematic style is another factor that forgoes the traditional depiction of the Hollywood heartthrob. While My Own Private Idaho's DVD cover description notes how it stars "America's hottest young male stars", the film's artistic flair and unorthodox imagery is less focused on flaunting the beauty and charisma of its actors. Instead, it contorts their golden-boy image into directionless, negligent and lawless characters. This departure from leading-man conventionality was incontrovertible, as Vincent Canby, in his 1991 New York Times film review, notes: "The performances, especially by the two young stars, are as surprising as they are sure." Reeves and Phoenix paint Scott and Mike with a genuine authenticity that doesn't poke fun or reduce the characters to hollow comedic opportunities, giving life to these two social-outcast delinquents with an intimate seriousness.

The film inverted the movie pin-up idea that audiences had grown accustomed to in other ways, too. The usual floppy hairstyle and boyish charm of the Hollywood leading man are replaced by a shaggy cut paired with untamed stubble. This grungy aesthetic also blends into Beatrix Aruna Pasztor's costume design. Mike is rarely without his burnt-orange dirt-scuffed jacket. Van Sant implements this gritty-edged style throughout his cinematic world; it is a million miles away from the action hero or suave-gentleman archetype Reeves and Phoenix could have otherwise channelled.

"It's certainly the case that there are trends in each era that come to temporarily define male imagery on the screen and that are reflective of cultural changes," Dr Karen McNally, reader in American film, television and cultural history at London Metropolitan University, tells BBC Culture. Many Hollywood movies of the 1980s presented "a hyper-masculinity of the Reagan era. Michael Douglas's entitled white masculinity in Wall Street and Fatal Attraction and the aggressive physicality of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger became emblems of the hyper-male politics and culture of the 1980s." It was this hardened masculinity, one that was unmoving and stoic, sitting at the intersection of mystery and virility, that Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho went on to undermine. From the physical closeness of the two characters to Mike's physical weakness with narcolepsy, the brutish male is non-existent here. 

Masculinity unravelled

The pair's previous film roles had been accessible and wide in appeal. While Reeves starred in the comedy Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991) as the titular Ted, and was a top-billing action hero in Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break (1991), Phoenix was coming into his own, and acting in mainstream blockbusters, including the younger version of Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). 

During the 90s, however, Reeves and Phoenix were couched beside contemporaries who were playing very different roles. The likes of Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Ethan Hawke, Will Smith and Heath Ledger embodied a new, emerging generation of charming, modern leading men. While these actors can be grouped together as 90s heartthrobs, their work differed hugely.

On the more expected side of the heartthrob range, you have an actor like Will Smith, whose blossoming breakthrough matured with his late 90s appearance as the charismatic blockbuster star in Men in Black (1997) and the headlining hero in the action-thriller Enemy of the State (1998). These mainstream macho-saviour roles, once the epitome of the heartthrob's work, were gradually being replaced by sensitive pin-ups: Matt Damon's Oscar-winning turn in Good Will Hunting (1997) allowed him the best of both worlds: to be a mathematic genius, and have the emotional sensitivity to cry. DiCaprio was also leaning towards this portrayal of a more sensitive masculinity, as he recited Shakespearean verse  throughout Romeo + Juliet (1996).

Both of these films see rigid masculinity unravelled. It is My Own Private Idaho, however, that is the very epitome of this radical pivot. In lieu of pin-up roles, Reeves and Phoenix –  although remaining a part of this heartthrob collective – present the most outright recalibration of the traditional teen-idol template in Van Sant's film with their emotionally sensitive performances. As Dr McNally puts it: "The introspective vulnerability of outsiders displayed by Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho becomes almost a reactive backlash against an earlier brand of masculinity and an attempt to redefine the screen male for the next decade."

Integral to this portrayal of sensitive masculinity is the film's much-lauded camp-fire scene, a pivotal centrepiece and a defining moment of these actors' superlative performances. Camping overnight on their journey to Mike's brother's house, hunting down clues to Mike's mother's whereabouts, Mike and Scott huddle around their flickering camp-fire. Scott lies outstretched with confident ease, while Mike is sitting with his knees coyly to his chest. The homoerotic tension mounts as Van Sant captures the moment of telling your best friend you are in love with them with the same theatrical tension as guns being drawn in a Western.

An object of desire for both Van Sant's lens and Mike's hesitant gaze, Scott mutters: "two guys can't love each other". Mike's whispered response is an agonising confession: "I could love someone even if I wasn't paid for it. I love you and you don't pay me… I really want to kiss you, man." His affections are no longer surreptitious but they are met with a softly spoken rejection. Yet Scott opens his arms for Mike to crawl into, cradling him close as they fall to sleep. The overwhelming and affecting sensitivity of the scene makes for, as Amy Taubin writes in her 2015 essay for The Criterion Channel, "a startlingly naked expression of lovelorn longing".

It is this male vulnerability from both Reeves and Phoenix that is salient in a scene whose career-impacting potential cannot be overstated. Reminiscing about Phoenix, his Stand by Me (1986) co-star Wil Wheaton described the actor as "this raw, emotional open wound all the time. He felt everything. And it's what made him such a wonderful, wonderful actor." In this apotheotic camp-fire scene, Phoenix embalms Mike's sincerity as both eloquent and messy, inarticulate then blunt, hopeful then rejected. It is a poetic tragedy the character doesn't shy away from or violently react to; instead, he brews in the fragility of his admission. Such emotional intelligence allows both 90s vanguards to digress from the more one-dimensional brand of masculinity that had dominated the 90s cinematic love interest.

Thirty years on, the disarmingly tender camp-fire moment still resonates with ground-breaking emotional force. When gazing over My Own Private Idaho's flickering flames, one can't help but draw comparison to present-day heartthrob Timothée Chalamet and his teary-eyed fireplace sequence that concludes Luca Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name (2017).

In Call Me By Your Name, Chalamet sensitively depicts Elio's sun-drenched summer of queer infatuation sparked by the arrival of his father's graduate student. With Chalamet, an emblem of today's magnetic teen idol, the resemblance between generational heartthrobs is strikingly similar. Not only did Chalamet star in Call Me By Your Name when he was the same age as Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho, but his character too comes to terms with an unrequited queer love that burns as fiercely as the flames before him. It seems Chalamet is walking a similar path to predecessors Reeves and Phoenix, or that the 90s stars at least made this path of a heartthrob accessible to a new generation of contemporary actors. 

Reflecting on Phoenix's legacy of reinvigorating the Hollywood pin-up, Edwards says: "While [Phoenix] had classic Hollywood leading-man looks and the sort of charisma that made people say he looked like he was glowing from within, he also espoused crunchy values [veganism and environmental activism]. That mix made him an alternative to the rest of the pretty teenage boys." It could be argued that Phoenix was ahead of his time. Today fans are asking for more than just good looks from their celebrity idols, they need to have something to say; for instance, Leonardo DiCaprio is an outspoken environmental activist, and after working with Woody Allen, Chalamet denounced the director and donated what he earnt from the film to charity. 

When it comes to performance colliding with persona, Phoenix is posthumously compared to James Dean, and it now seems Chalamet is being likened to Phoenix. Passing the heartthrob mantle forward, Phoenix's re-making of Hollywood's manhood in My Own Private Idaho was a reckoning, and one can only imagine what his acting prowess would have gone on to conquer if it were not for his premature death.

Meanwhile, Reeves's career flourished after My Own Private Idaho. He went on to star in The Matrix and the John Wick franchises, blossoming from pin-up to one of Hollywood's greats. It seems Chalamet may have taken note, for he too straddles arthouse and blockbuster, the latter more recently with his leading role as the universe's deity in Denis Villeneuve's Dune (2021).

Emerging as two of the most celebrated and idiosyncratic actors of the 90s, Reeves and Phoenix's gave performances in My Own Private Idaho – at the zenith of their heartthrob status – that allowed an impressive emancipation from the narrow scope of the leading man. Registering as a reverential artefact in their filmographies, My Own Private Idaho took its stars to places where Hollywood wouldn't take its heartthrobs: to political and artistic expression with drug-dazed homosexual hustlers.

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