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When he filmed Stand by Me , the 1986 Rob Reiner adaptation of Stephen King’s novella The Body , River Phoenix was only 14. In 1990, the year my middle-school friends and I watched a rented VHS copy of that movie at every sleepover, we were 13. If you’d asked us at the time, we wouldn’t have been able to explain why Phoenix’s character, Chris Chambers—the brave, wrong-side-of-the-tracks leader of the boy gang on a quest to see a dead body—did it for us. To be sure, Phoenix always had a foxlike, sincere handsomeness. But the other actors we liked played dangerous, older, more explicitly romantic characters—Christian Slater’s J.D. in Heathers, Patrick Swayze’s

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