I’m gonna tell you the main difference between the serious, downer juvenile delinquent movies and the campy, ridiculous juvenile delinquent movies.
It’s GOOD ACTING (and a director who knows how to make that happen). That’s about it.
One movie has Dennis Hopper and Crispin Glover in it, the other has Mamie Van Doren and Scott Marlowe in it. JD flicks are always over the top. When the plot needs to start rolling, everyone’s always making the worst possible decisions. Because they’re kids. That’s what they do. They want love and acceptance—and sometimes someone gets killed along the way. Meanwhile, all of the adults around them are either ineffectual or 100% dysfunctional. The good and the bad movies all have that in common.
It’s what happens in River’s Edge, one of the most bleak teen movies of all-time and maybe the next great dark teen movie after Over the Edge from 1979. The setting here is never specified, but it was shot mostly in Sacramento, California and could pass for a drab corner of the Pacific Northwest. Give these kids some instruments and amps and they’ll start to form Nirvana.
Everyone’s poor. The sky is in a perpetual overcast state. Everyone’s hopes and dreams are rained upon and mud-splattered. It’s where a high school girl is murdered by her boyfriend. All we see is the body in the grass. Her (and his) circle of friends all see it, too. And no one wants to say anything. Nobody immediately calls the police. They struggle with what to do next because none of them wants to be cast out of the group (or face the wrath of Crispin Glover, who’s sort of their high-strung, half-cocked “leader”, mostly because he’s always talking, even if he’s usually saying a whole lot of nothing). And that’s the movie. It’s not an intricate plot. Character moments drive the story and the young cast are mixed-up and barely articulate in a painfully accurate way. Then there’s Dennis Hopper turning in the second best performance of his mighty comeback year of 1986 (after Blue Velvet) as an old burnout who’s mostly only good for selling drugs to the kids and dancing privately with his blow-up sex doll. When it comes to anything else, the hamster wheel in his brain is a little rusty. His eyes always seem to be looking at something that’s nowhere in the room.
For his third feature, working with a screenplay by Neal Jimenez, director Tim Hunter is confident and makes a lot happen in ninety-nine minutes without ever seeming to try too hard. This film breathes in and breathes out. It feels comfortable even as it goes to grim places. Still, for whatever reason, Hunter went on to be a busy television director with a rare feature here and there once or twice a decade.