The Rob Reiner (1947-2025) film I’ve chosen to rewatch since his tragic death is Stand by Me (1986), the one he reportedly identified with the most. Based on a Stephen King novella, The Body, it’s a story of four preteen male friends in small-town 1959 Oregon who set out to find a missing boy they’ve heard is dead, hoping this will make them local heroes. It’s narrated by one of the gang now grown up, Gordie (Richard Dreyfuss).
The Stand by Me trailer:
The Boys
Youngster Gordie is played by Wil Wheaton, who’s closest to Chris (River Phoenix). Walter Goodman, New York Times: “Chris understands how Gordie feels about the death a few months before of his idolized older brother, whom their father preferred to Gordie. Chris is a born psychologist, who explains to Gordie that the problem is not that his father doesn’t like him but that he doesn’t know him. Chris is also supportive; he keeps assuring Gordie that some day he will be a great writer.”
Sheila Benson, Los Angeles Times: Teddy (Corey Feldman) is “the one closest to the edge. Damaged and abused by his father, he still emulates the Normandy Beach heroics that distinguished and traumatized his dad. What’s heartbreaking about the rage-filled, daredevil Teddy is how easily he can go in either direction.”
Vern (Jerry O’Connell) is “…a compendium of all our fears as kids: the one who will invariably forget the secret password knock, who’s afraid of almost everything from heights to darks. Earnest and sweetly dim, he’s also outrageously lovable.”
Further Plot/Character Development
The town teenage toughs led by Kiefer Sutherland‘s character have also decided, it turns out, to retrieve the dead boy. A scary confrontation will ensue between these two types of determined boy gangs, each seemingly as intent on winning as they are on not being “girls,” “pussies,” or “faggots.”
Thirty years after this Reiner release, Charles Bramesco, Rolling Stone, highlighted “the fearlessness with which it confronts the ugliness of maturity.”
Furthermore, it’s noted that the youngsters’ insecurities are rooted in their home lives. “The film tacitly links Teddy’s volatile behavior to his fraught relationship with his father, a WWII vet who mutilated his boy’s ear during what we’re led to understand is a post-traumatic fit. (More touching still, Teddy flips into defensive mad-dog mode when a trashmonger dares to call his father a ‘loony.’) Chris comes from a family full of crooks and booze-hounds, and Gordie himself wrestles with profound survivor’s guilt over the death of his brother (John Cusack) while his grief-stricken parents have completely disengaged from the world around them.”
The Real Life Issues of Stand by Me‘s Director and Main Stars
Unrelated to Stand by Me, known mental health and/or addiction issues of the cast include:
- Reiner and his son Nick, his alleged killer, made the drama Being Charlie (2015) based on their father-son struggles over Nick’s drug addiction.
- Phoenix (1970-1993) died in his early 20’s from a drug overdose.
- Wheaton, open about his mental health struggles, has declared, “I Live With Chronic Depression and Generalized Anxiety. I Am Not Ashamed,” on the NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) site.
- Feldman is a trauma survivor who has struggled with addiction and mental health issues.
- Sutherland acknowledges past substance abuse problems.
- Dreyfuss calls himself “proudly bipolar” (BPHope.com).
