Van Sant's tale of bisexual street hustlers pushed to society's edges by sexuality or indifference was a high point of the New Queer Cinema movement, and a marker for an era. Its cult-in-the-making status was apparent on its 1991 release, thanks to the sympathetic portrayal of a youth subculture that preferred to drift rather than stick in a world that Bush Sr. made; and to the dream casting of River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, poster boys of disaffected charm and ambiguously defined sexuality. Years later, the sudden death of Phoenix (arguably his generation's James Dean) gave the film an even more powerful, melancholy aura. Phoenix is a street prostitute who dreams of finding his missing mother in between tricks and amusingly frequent bouts of narcolepsy; Reeves is another young hustler who's literally slumming it, being the son of the mayor. A loose adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry IV anchors Van Sant's free-floating, poetic eloquence and the slouched, dreams-long-gone demeanor of his cast.