Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
In this loose adaptation of Shakespeare's "Henry IV," Mike Waters is a hustler afflicted with narcolepsy. Scott Favor is the rebellious son of a mayor. Together, the two travel from Portland, Oregon to Idaho and finally to the coast of Italy in a quest to find Mike's estranged mother. Along the way they turn tricks for money and drugs, eventually attracting the attention of a wealthy benefactor and sexual deviant.
Gus Van Sant's fever-dream road movie is one of the most distinctive American films of its era. River Phoenix delivers a legendary, deeply vulnerable performance as Mike Waters, arguably the finest work of his career, while Keanu Reeves holds his own as the ambivalent Scott. The cinematography is genuinely visionary — Van Sant and DP Eric Alan Edwards craft hallucinatory Idaho landscapes, fragmented dream sequences, and intimate close-ups into a wholly singular visual language. The loose Shakespeare grafting, the narcoleptic fugue states, the time-lapse skies: the film's conception is unmistakably one-of-a-kind, earning maximum Novelty. The plot, however, is deliberately episodic and elliptical to a fault — its picaresque structure resists conventional dramatic momentum, which is partly the point but leaves some threads (the Italian detour especially) feeling underdeveloped. The ending, while poetically resonant in its melancholy, is abrupt and somewhat unsatisfying in its emotional resolution for Mike, making it feel more deflating than transcendent.