River Phoenix as young Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) . Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy View image in fullscreen River Phoenix as young Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) . Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy Ranked Film ‘James Dean has got nothing on that kid’: River Phoenix films – ranked! As Stand By Me is re-released for its 40th anniversary, we look at the late actor’s most intense, enduring roles – from a goofball boffin to a narcoleptic hustler
Prefer the Guardian on Google 16. Circle of Violence: A Family Drama (1986) Issue-of-the-week TV movie about elder abuse, with Tuesday Weld as a harried mum taking out her frustrations on her own ageing mother. Phoenix slaps on the hair gel as the essentially decent son who blasts his music too loud, lets his rowdy if unusually spiffy pals put their feet on the furniture and resents the new house guest: “Grandma is really getting on my nerves!”
View image in fullscreen ‘Mad with grief’ … Phoenix in Silent Tongue. Photograph: United Archives GmbH/Alamy Sam Shepard’s turgid western premiered at Sundance in early 1993, then sat on the shelf for a year. As with his unfinished final film, Dark Blood, Phoenix plays a desert-dwelling widower gone mad with grief. In this case, his father (Richard Harris) steals a second wife for him from the travelling showman (Alan Bates) who sold him his first. Nuance is not required from Phoenix here, just doleful, brooding twitchiness. A family connection: his brother Joaquin later played Harris’s son, too, in Gladiator.
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich, this was the last film Phoenix completed. Samantha Mathis (his then girlfriend), Dermot Mulroney and a pre-fame Sandra Bullock are aspiring country-and-western musicians convening in Nashville, but their warm, lively work only underlines how ill at ease Phoenix seems on screen. As the most gifted performer of the bunch, he is remote in ways that can’t easily be explained away as acting choices. “He looks ill,” observed the critic Roger Ebert, who thought the performance “should have been seen by someone as a cry for help”.
View image in fullscreen Son of a sleeper agent … Phoenix in Little Nikita. Photograph: Cine Text/Sportsphoto/Allstar Espionage for dummies. Phoenix is the all-American high-schooler Jeff, who has no inkling that he is really Nikita, son of Russian sleeper agents. That’s until undercover FBI man Sidney Poitier cosies up to him and spills the beans. Both deserve better than this minefield of spy-movie cliches, but you’ll never catch Phoenix coasting. He delivers the line “Truth has no meaning in this house!” with all the conviction of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause screaming, “You’re tearing me apart!”
Despite a strong cast (Ellen Burstyn, Molly Ringwald, Paul Sorvino) and direction by British television veteran Waris Hussein (Doctor Who, Henry VIII and His Six Wives), this TV movie about a teen suicide pact is mostly soapy and simplistic. Phoenix is affectingly uninhibited, though, as the grieving sibling: “Boy, he must have hated us,” he weeps after the death of his beloved older brother. He won a Young Artist award for his troubles, beating his co-star, Poltergeist poppet Heather O’Rourke, who died three years later at the age of 12.
View image in fullscreen On-set tensions … Phoenix with Judy Davis and Jonathan Pryce in Dark Blood. Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy A little more than half of Phoenix’s final movie was in the can when he…