Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #65: My Own Private Idaho (1991).

In Portland, Oregon live Mike (River Phoenix) and Scott (Keanu Reeves). They're homeless, enjoy drugs and sell their bodies to get by. Mike is a taciturn gay narcoleptic obsessed with finding his mother after having been abandoned during childhood. Scott's from an affluent family but has chosen to slum it until he can receive his inheritance; neither gets along with his father.

After meeting and instantly clicking, they embark on a road trip from Oregon to Idaho in search of Mike's mum, encountering and falling under the spell of numerous fellow misfits on their way across a barren American landscape.

Although it wasn't his debut, before writer-director Gus Van Sant recreated Harvey Milk's story, turned Nicole Kidman into a scheming, adulterous TV weather-girl in To Die For and gave Matt Damon his breakthrough in Good Will Hunting, he had his own with this lauded 1991 beauty. Openly gay himself, Van Sant delicately turns the standard coming-of-age road movie into a sympathetic juxtaposition of sexualities as well as empathetically exploring the pain of disaffected youth, and by including overt references to Shakespeare's Henry IV and V he adds a bohemian feel without it becoming pretentious.

And the acting is just exquisite. The late River Phoenix (RIP) here had his bravest role ever and he fills Mike with such expert nuances and layers that it became his finest hour (particularly in the campfire scene, where he expresses his unrequited love for the straight Scott), and Reeves, for all his usual woodenness on screen, actually holds his own.

Gus Van Sant is one of modern cinema's finest artists, and he's made so many films about troubled young males. But very few have been this successful.