As Stand By Me Turns 40, It Remains a Brilliant Portrait of Boyhood

Stand By Me turned 40 three days ago. 

The film essentially starts with four boys craving an adventure, a desire of wanting to see a dead body. In its heart though, it's about the familiar, unrepeatable texture that comes with being twelve, an age most men can describe with startling precision decades later, down to the smell of the woods or the exact taunt a friend used against them. "It had a mixture of melancholy and humour and nostalgia and it was of the period," Reiner said of the film, which drew directly on his own adolescence in the late fifties. It marked, by his own account, the first time he made anything that reflected his personal sensibility and not just the satire he had built his early career on. 

Wil Wheaton's Gordie, River Phoenix's Chris, Corey Feldman's Teddy and Jerry O'Connell's Vern spend a single weekend outside the fictional town of Castle Rock, and across that weekend Reiner locates earnestly true moments about the way boys learn to carry grief and fear, without ever being handed the vocabulary that adults use for such things.

These are boys still more occupied with cowboy serials and crude jokes than with girls, and yet each of them carries the residue of a world well beyond childhood- a father's drinking, a war a grown man never speaks of, a family with too little money and too much shame about it. Teddy is the clearest case of this complexity. His father is not a kind man, and Teddy knows it. Yet he still speaks of him as a hero, still needs to believe there is something worth holding onto in him. It is less about denial than about a boy's need to stay close to a parent regardless of what that parent has put him through. The weight of these things sit with these boys throughout the film, and it is made obvious to us, but it’s a struggle for them to open up about these things with each other. 

And that’s how it usually plays out with a lot of young boys in real life too. It is this clear-eyed treatment of what boyhood costs that gives the film its case for what makes a young man. The boys perform toughness constantly, trading insults or recoiling from any hint of softness. Ace Merrill and his gang of older boys act as a preview of what this performance calcifies into if nobody interrupts it. What interrupts it here is the friendship between Gordie and Chris, which allows for a beautiful depiction of honesty. They cry without shame in front of each other, and they tell each other the truth about their families and their fears- something that feels like a burden lifted off their shoulder, at least for the time being, as long as they are together. 

Chris is the one who insists Gordie has a future as a writer worth pursuing, and Gordie is the one who tells Chris he does not have to become his father, and each boy, in seeing the good in the other, is given some way of believing in his own. What both boys are really after is that feeling of somebody having faith in you, and it need not come from a father figure at all. Just a friend you love telling you that the one thing you have always wanted to do is achievable goes a long way for most kids. 

Where the film cracks the code to a good “coming of age” film, is the bittersweet taste it leaves in your mouth when it comes to handling nostalgia. It hands you the truth of what sits at the brink of everyone's childhood- one last time doing the thing you did with the kids you always did it with, without any of you knowing in the moment that it might be the last time. 

Against a decade of cinema built on spectacle, on time travel and fighter jets and outsized escapism, this is a small story about one summer between four boys. Forty years and no shortage of inspired television and film later, from the Duffer brothers' Stranger Things down to nearly every ensemble of kids on bikes that has followed it, Stand By Me simply has an unbeatable rawness to it. Even the boys' own quest was a reach for something older than themselves- a headline, a story worth bringing home, a small taste of the adult world before any of them were ready for it. It is only years later, looking back the way Gordie does, that the same boys would give anything to have that summer returned to them exactly as it was.