My Own Private Idaho

Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho is a tender, uneven drama about young men who sell sex and struggle to find affection. We recommend it for River Phoenix, whose Mike Waters gives even the more mannered passages someone worth staying with. Van Sant writes and directs a road film that keeps wandering into Shakespeare, dreams and fragments of home films. The mixture is sometimes awkward, but his attention to Mike’s loneliness makes the wandering worthwhile.

Mike is a gay hustler with narcolepsy; Scott Favor, played by Keanu Reeves, is his friend and fellow hustler. Their lives around Portland give Van Sant room to observe how companionship develops between people with different emotional needs. Phoenix seems painfully available to other people, while Reeves often looks as if he could step away without much difficulty. We were moved by Mike’s longing for Scott, because Phoenix makes the wish to be loved seem embarrassing to the person feeling it. He lets us see the effort involved in admitting a need.

John J. Campbell and Eric Alan Edwards photograph landscapes with a spaciousness that suits lives spent moving without getting far. The rougher street imagery keeps those views from turning the journey into a holiday. Curtiss Clayton’s editing allows inserts of home films and dreamlike passages to interrupt the present, putting us close to Mike without making his experience entirely clear. These interruptions are often more expressive than another scene of explanation would have been. Clayton lets us register the difference between the street scenes and the more private images, rather than smoothing everything into one continuous journey.

David Brisbin’s production design gives the Shakespearean exchanges the same contemporary setting as the hustlers’ ordinary conversations. That continuity helps, even when the language makes the two kinds of scene difficult to reconcile. Bill Stafford’s music gives the wandering an inviting rhythm, helping the quieter stretches hold our attention. There is a risk of making this unsettled life seem too appealing, but the music’s warmth makes sense beside Van Sant’s affection for the people living it.

The trouble is the Henry IV material, which makes the film’s changes of voice harder to accept. Van Sant’s screenplay moves between ordinary speech and Shakespearean rhythms, and the join can be distracting. Reeves is effective when his reserve leaves Mike doing the emotional work, but the heightened dialogue asks for an ease he does not consistently find. These passages can feel rehearsed in a film whose appeal elsewhere is the sense that people have been caught living. We wanted some of these exchanges to finish sooner.

As a road film, it spends more time on how people pass their days than on arranging a useful lesson at the next stop. That patience allows Mike and Scott to exist without being made to explain everyone who lives as they do. The humour matters too: lonely, vulnerable people are allowed to be funny without their loneliness becoming the joke. At 104 minutes, the film does not outstay our interest, even when the Shakespeare becomes a strain. Watch it for Phoenix, and allow Van Sant a few detours you may not want to take twice.