By David Denby

From the May 18, 1997 issue of New York magazine, pages 90-93:

Tim Hunter's River's Edge is the most disturbing movie I have seen in the nearly nine years I have held this job. Certainly not the best, but the most disturbing. This brilliant, messy little picture, another triumph for the independent film movement, should cause people to argue and celebrate for years - argue over how it could have been done better, celebrate that it was done at all. In recent years, American movies have followed teenagers from school to shopping mall to make-out couch, and some of these pictures have been skillful and charming. But as far as real moral interest or complexity goes, this is the only one that matters.

Among recent ambitious movies, David Lynch's Blue Velvet doesn't get under the skin in the same way. Lynch puts demonic stuff on the screen, but even in his most feverish moments we're aware of his grip, his "vision." A voluptuous, insinuating look at the underside of small-city American life, Blue Velvet was Lynch's cherished nightmare. River's Edge, on the other hand, is everyone's nightmare, a cloud of misery wafting out of the familiar confusions and vacancies of American adolescence. And perhaps because they are still searching, trying to find the sinister side of commonplace things, the director, Tim Hunter (Tex), the young screenw riter, Neal Jimenez, and the cast of largely unknown young actors don't have a perfect hold on their subject. Some of the movie is sheer bravado and pretty terrible. Yet the failures of River's Edge paradoxically make me care about it more. Blue Velvet, for all its flowers-of-evil bloom, quickly receded into the semi-comforting realm of "art." But this time, I'm sure, the bad dream won't fade away.

Standing on a bridge over a swollen and muddy river, a little boy slowly, deliberately drops a doll into the water. The camera, which has been looking up at him, rises over his head, crosses to the other side of the bridge, and sees what he sees upriver-a girl lying on the bank, naked, bluish-white, and a teenage boy next to her on the ground, rocking back and forth and howling at the sky. The dead girl looks like a larger version of the doll now submerged in the water. Later, in a flashback, we briefly s ee the crime, and we never have any reason to doubt what the teenager, John (Daniel Roebuck), says of it-that the girl didn't provoke him, didn't do much of anything, and that he killed her on a whim, because it made him feel powerful. Huge, with close-se t eyes, a mean little mouth, and hulking, shapeless body, John takes his place in the American procession of motiveless killers. We have noticed his face, with a passing shudder, on the evening news. He's scary but familiar. The movie's true horror lies e lsewhere.

Casually, John boasts to his friends (girls as well as boys) that he has killed the girl, who is their friend, too. Calling his bluff, they accompany him to the river, where they poke at the cold, naked corpse, trying to make sure they aren't being kidded . They are shocked, but no one mourns; and no one denounces the killer or even says much of anything. The leader of the group, Layne (Crispin Glover) - as much a psychopath as John but ambitious - decides that protecting John from the cops could b e a great adventure, a test of loyalty and courage. The girl is dead, isn't she? She can't be brought back, Layne reasons, so why say anything about her? Only John, who is still alive, matters. The kids' blank, unthinking amorality is so appalling, it's f unny.

Though based on a 1981 incident in Northern California, the movie offers no clue as to its setting. It could be set wherever social bonds are loose and there's little to do. Hanging out together at school and around town, the kids are a bedraggled rat pac k, frenetic yet depressed, worshipers of their own moth-eaten cult. Drugs, souped up cars, crappy "Death Metal" rock- their preoccupations could be a haplessly demoralized parody of sixties culture. The little boy who drops the doll off the bridge is angr y because he's too young to get into the gang - there's nothing else for him to look forward to. The mad Layne is their leader simply because he's the most determined to become a thug; he goes too far, a wildly neurotic bully whom the others can't resist (when they do, they feel they are finking out).

Like the 1979 youth-exploitation film Over the Edge, which Tim Hunter wrote (with Charlie Haas), River's Edge captures the way teens build a disastrously enclosed world. They're sure they shouldn't report the murder to the police. That woul d be "narcing" - ratting, telling the grown-ups, who never understand a thing. The filmmakers' point, I think, is that the kids' exclusion of adults may be tragic, but it's the source of the only emotional life they've got. Tex showed that Hunter is a partisan of adolescence as a state of mind and body. In movies, the loyalties that kids demonstrate toward one another, however dumb, are a twisted form of honor.

The one who finally breaks away and goes to the cops, Matt (Keanu Reeves), is a decent boy struggling for clarity. Like the others, Matt lives in a squalid, trailer-trash house, with harassed, overworked adults. His own father has vanished, replaced by a noisy, exasperated lout; his mom, a nurse, is worn out. All the kids have grown up in a vacuum, without any models, any authority they can respect. (At school, a teacher who is a veteran of the sixties pontificates about social responsibility, but his rap is overbearing and he's ignored.) A cranky, paranoid old biker (played, inevitably, by Dennis Hopper) is the closest thing they've got to a role model, and the guy's hold on them is based on his boast that he, too, killed his girlfriend, some twenty year s earlier. The difference, he says, is that he killed her out of love. In his own myth-ridden mind his crime of passion makes him a moral hero. Hopper's burning eyes give these pronouncements a black-comedy fanaticism.

Mere stupidity, as you may have guessed, isn't what River's Edge is about. Jimenez and Hunter are getting at a phenomenon that has haunted the twentieth century the way Satan haunted the Middle Ages - affectlessness, indifference, the inability to feel what we think human beings should feel. These kids aren't connected inside: The doll thrown into the water is mourned, the friend murdered by another friend is not. Why not? In part because the friendships here, however intense, are largely provisio nal, based on drugs, a shared mood, the jokes of a season. In their own terms, the kids are being honest.

Yet Hunter, who keeps returning to the purple-lipped, naked corpse, surely intends to suggest something momentous: Leaving a dead body unburied, the boys and girls casually violate a fundamental taboo of Western civilization, blithely committing a crime whose horror once resounded through the Greek myths, Homer, Sophocles. All right, this isn't ancient Greece: The rain-soaked landscapes may look godfo rsaken, but the ground won't rise up to accuse any one. Still, Hunter has created a modern myth: The kids' behavior, in the end, can't be reduced to sociology. There is something uncanny about it. The rain has made a hellish, tangled bank out of the river 's edge.

River's Edge sent me tumbling head over heels. Though wonderfully photographed (by Frederick Elmes), the movie is rough, with some obvious mistakes. There are boring passages of wrangling among the kids; Dennis Hopper's insane biker is a bit of ma nnerist, post-sixties hipsterism; and Hunter makes his points about affectlessness with too much rhetoric. Worst of all, Crispin Glover's work as Layne, which I fervently wanted to be great, risks disaster - and sometimes achieves it. Glover, whose perfor mance as the father in Back to the Future was a brilliantly masochistic piece of cartoon acting, has a long pale nose and chin, and here he wears a black ski cap, with black hair flowing down to his shoulders. Pacing around crazily, he's the Wicke d Witch of the Shopping Mall. His speech - industrial waste clogging a running stream - is sluttish, jeering, pathetic. Glover gets to the truth of something by wild exaggeration, yet he's not a comic, he's serious, so he seems almost nuts. The performan ce has already been denounced as a catastrophe. I thought it was desperate and moving. So is the whole movie.

(Picture caption reads: "Grim Reaper: Crispin Glover in River's Edge.")