Stand by Me

The basic premise of Stand by Me could hardly be simpler. Four boys hear that the body of a missing teenager may have been discovered somewhere outside their small Oregon town, and they decide to go and find it.

Gordie, Chris, Teddy and Vern tell their parents they are camping out and begin following the railway tracks towards where they believe the body lies.

That gives Rob Reiner everything he needs.

There is no enormous adventure waiting for them. No treasure. No world to save. Instead, the journey creates space for four friends to talk, argue, joke, frighten each other and gradually reveal things they normally keep hidden.

By the time they reach their destination, finding the body almost feels secondary. What matters is everything that happened while they were getting there.

The friendship at the centre of Stand by Me works because these boys do not behave like four interchangeable movie kids.

Gordie is quiet and thoughtful, still struggling with grief and convinced that his family barely notices him. Chris has intelligence and sensitivity hidden beneath a reputation he inherited from his family. Teddy is volatile, funny and fiercely protective of a father who has caused him enormous pain. Vern is nervous, innocent and frequently several steps behind everybody else.

Together, they behave exactly like close childhood friends often do.

They insult one another constantly. They laugh at stupid things. They argue over nothing. They can be incredibly cruel one minute and completely loyal the next.

Reiner never needs to keep telling us these boys are friends. We believe it because of how comfortable they are around one another.

Wil Wheaton gives Gordie a wonderful quietness.

He is grieving the death of his older brother Denny, but perhaps even more painful is the feeling that his parents would have preferred the other son to have survived.

That insecurity follows Gordie throughout the journey.

He is clearly intelligent and imaginative, yet he struggles to believe those qualities matter. His friends can see something in him that he cannot see in himself, particularly Chris, who understands that Gordie's ability to tell stories might eventually carry him somewhere beyond their small town.

That gives the film another layer. Stand by Me is not simply about remembering childhood. It is also about the moment somebody believes in you before you've learned to believe in yourself.

River Phoenix was only a teenager when Stand by Me was made, yet there is an extraordinary maturity to his performance as Chris Chambers.

Chris understands how people see him. His family's reputation has already created expectations about the person he will become, and part of him fears there may be no escaping them.

But the boy we actually meet is thoughtful, protective and far more perceptive than many of the adults around him.

His friendship with Gordie is particularly moving because Chris recognises his friend's potential immediately. While Gordie doubts himself, Chris keeps pushing him towards the life he believes he deserves.

Knowing how young Phoenix himself would be when he died inevitably adds another layer of sadness when watching the film today, but the performance does not need that history to be affecting. Chris is the emotional centre of the group because he seems to understand, earlier than the others, that childhood does not last forever.

It would have been easy for Teddy and Vern to exist simply to make the audience laugh.

Instead, Corey Feldman and Jerry O'Connell give both boys enough vulnerability to make them feel like genuine members of the group.

Teddy's wild behaviour hides a complicated relationship with his father. He desperately clings to an heroic image of the man despite knowing, somewhere underneath, how badly he has been treated.

Vern is easier to underestimate. He is frightened by almost everything and frequently becomes the target of the others' jokes, but his innocence is an important part of the group dynamic.

The humour surrounding both characters is essential because Stand by Me understands something about childhood that more sentimental films sometimes forget: kids can find almost anything funny, even when serious things are happening around them.

Stand by Me was adapted from Stephen King's novella The Body, and anyone who associates King entirely with supernatural horror might be surprised by how grounded the story is.

There are no haunted hotels, supernatural creatures or impossible forces waiting in the woods.

The frightening things here are much more ordinary.

There are violent older teenagers, difficult parents, grief, insecurity and the discovery that adults do not always protect children in the way children assume they should.

Perhaps that is why the story still feels so recognisably like King. Beneath the horror and fantasy in much of his work has always been a fascination with childhood, friendship and the things people carry with them into adulthood.

Stand by Me brings those ideas to the surface.

Stand by Me is deeply nostalgic, but it never makes childhood look easy.

The boys have enormous freedom. They wander for miles without phones, GPS trackers or adults checking their location every few minutes. They explore, get into trouble and create the sort of memories that will remain with them for decades.

But freedom does not mean innocence.

Each boy is carrying something.

Gordie has grief. Chris has the weight of his family's reputation. Teddy has his father. Even their adventure begins because another child is dead.

That mixture is what keeps the film from becoming sugary nostalgia. Looking backwards can make childhood appear simpler than adulthood, but Stand by Me remembers that the emotions you experience at twelve can feel every bit as enormous as anything that comes later.

For much of the journey, finding the missing boy is almost an abstraction.

Gordie and his friends know why they are walking, but there is still excitement surrounding the idea. They imagine recognition and attention when they return home with an extraordinary story.

Then they actually arrive.

Suddenly this is no longer an adventure.

The reality of seeing another young person who will never go home changes the mood completely. The boys are confronted with death not as something adults talk about or something that happened somewhere else, but as something physically present in front of them.

For Gordie in particular, already carrying the loss of his brother, that moment brings emotions to the surface that the entire journey has been quietly building towards.

It is where the boys' adventure ends and something more complicated begins.

Kiefer Sutherland's Ace Merrill gives Stand by Me exactly as much menace as it needs.

He is not a complicated villain, nor should he be. To four younger boys, Ace and his friends represent the frightening older kids who suddenly make the world feel much less safe.

What makes Ace effective is how casual his cruelty seems.

The final confrontation also gives Gordie an opportunity to demonstrate how much has changed during the journey. The quiet boy who began the film uncertain of almost everything reaches a point where something matters enough for him to stand his ground.

It is not an action-hero transformation.

It is simply a child discovering that fear does not always have to decide what happens next.

Stand by Me changes as you age.

Watch it when you're young and the adventure dominates. Railway tracks, junkyards, campfires and the possibility of disappearing with your friends for a couple of days seem enormously appealing.

Watch it later and something else becomes much more noticeable.

The friendships we assume will last forever often don't.

People move away. Interests change. Lives take different directions. Someone who once knew everything about you can gradually become somebody you haven't spoken to in years.

The film understands this without becoming bitter about it. A friendship does not become less important simply because it eventually ends.

Sometimes people belong to a particular chapter of your life, and what remains decades later is the person you became partly because they were there.

That is the idea that gives Stand by Me its lasting emotional power.

Stand by Me does not have the obvious scale of many films we associate with the 1980s.

There are no giant action sequences, elaborate visual effects or enormous fantasy worlds.

Four boys mostly walk along railway tracks.

Yet it has endured because the things it cares about are universal.

Friendship. Family. Grief. Fear. Growing up. Remembering people who once meant everything to us.

Rob Reiner would go on to make an extraordinary run of films across very different genres, while the young cast would become permanently associated with one of cinema's most recognisable groups of childhood friends.

But the film's greatest achievement is simpler than that.

It makes someone else's childhood feel strangely capable of reminding you of your own.

Beautifully.

Stand by Me is funny, sad and nostalgic, but what keeps it from becoming sentimental is its honesty.

These boys are not idealised versions of childhood friends. They swear, argue, tease each other, behave stupidly and occasionally say things designed specifically to hurt. They are also fiercely loyal when it really matters.

Wil Wheaton gives Gordie the quiet centre the story needs, Corey Feldman and Jerry O'Connell bring enormous personality to Teddy and Vern, and River Phoenix delivers a performance as Chris that remains remarkably affecting.

Rob Reiner understands that the real story was never about four boys trying to find a body.

It was about the distance between the person who begins that walk and the person who comes home afterwards — and about how, years later, we can still remember the people who walked beside us.

Movies in the 80s verdict: An unforgettable coming-of-age classic. ★★★★★