Hollywood has no shortage of coming-of-age teen comedies structured around a young man’s hormones. But there was also a time where it was less afraid to cast the heartthrob of the moment (River Phoenix) as an aspiring poet with beatnik aspirations, easily seducing and eagerly seducible, but on a quest to win his one true love. This is a romance with a comic tone hovering between the broad and the delicate, one the film mostly achieves.

The film is set in the North Shore of Chicago in 1962., It’s based on a biographical novel by its screen-writer/director, who sees his past through somewhat rose-tinted lenses. Jimmy Reardon wants to go to university and study literature. His father wants him to study business at a local college, like he did. They had a deal to each pay half. But at the very beginning of the film Jimmy gets conned out of his college money (all $110 of it. Ostensibly annual tuition at the University of Chicago in 1962 was $220) when he hands over all his savings to a young woman who’s already conned three others on a phony abortion claim. Now he needs to come up with his half of the money or it’s goodbye to the No Exit café, with its art, poetry and espresso – no more brushing up to girls who read Kierkegaard — and hello to McInley Business College.  This is all made more difficult in that all his friends seem to be country-club rich. It’s a film with a pointed view of class but one so American and so of its period that it’s worth an analysis of its own. Middle-class America’s idea of ‘poor’ in 1962 must have seemed quite rich to foreigners then, or indeed much of America now.

William Richert, the director was convinced that this was a masterpiece the studio had screwed over. Twenty years after its first release, he called on critics to see and re-evaluate his cut, with the original Elmer Bernstein score restored, his choice of a beautiful Johnny Mathis ballad – I’m Not Afraid to Say Goodbye — to set the tone at the beginning, and a voice-over narration performed by Richert  himself added on. I  liked it very much, even seen on the terrible print Amazon prime makes available, but a masterpiece it’s not. It’s got lovely performances from Ann Magnuson as an older woman, Luke Perry in his first role as a rich kid  whose money could solve all of Jimmy’s problems, and most of all River Phoenix, in his first starrig role, daring and tender and true in all he does. But Richert’s voice-over is mannered and inexpressive. He would go on to perform Shakespeare in MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO, but he would have done better to hire someone else here. Richert also has no visual sense, and it’s a film that seems entirely maintained by the rhythm’s of speech, situation and performance. But that’s enough; and on top of that, it shows a love for the odd, the weird, the outsider, the bohemian and gives weight to Robin Hood’s answer when Maid Marian asks him why he bothers to help the poor in the Curtiz/ Keighley film. It’s a lot to love.

José Arroyo