This month and next, the Roxie Theater is presenting A Keanu Summer featuring five of our dude’s most excellent films. To celebrate this series — and the man at its center — we’re each taking a moment to honor Keanu and his many, many facets.
Before he was Neo, Keanu Reeves was a neophyte. Like a lot of us, Keanu was once a dopy 20-something, but unlike nearly any of us, he was also an actor already showing his impressive range. Keanu could do it all: numbed stoner with a conscience (River’s Edge, 1986); grieving friend with a secret (Permanent Record, 1988); dumb boyfriend with a heart of gold (Parenthood, 1989); and, of course, wide-eyed time-traveling metalhead (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, 1989; Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, 1991).
Keanu suffused each of these roles with sweetness, cluelessness, and an undeniable sex appeal. Not for nothing did the Brit wits at The Modern Review put Keanu on the cover in 1993 with the headline “Young, Dumb, and Full of Come.” (I had the T-shirt, the premium for subscribing to that short-lived rag dedicated to “low culture for highbrows.”)
Of all the teen spirited roles Keanu played back then, my favorite remains his smallest: In 1990, Keanu appeared on The Tracey Ullman Show — “the nation’s showcase for psychiatrist jokes and musical comedy numbers,” per Troy McClure— in a sketch called “Two Lost Souls”
Yes, this sketch is totally cringey in the post-Mary Kay Letourneau era, but what’s not to love about Keanu prancing around his messy teen bedroom after hooking up with his parents’ landscape artist? Keanu’s comedic timing is perfect, especially when he tells Ullman with utter sincerity that they shared their first kiss “underneath my copy of Great Expectations”?
Keanu’s adolescent earnestness is perfectly calibrated and extremely funny. You completely believe that Ullman’s Barbara could fall for this kid who’s just so young, so dumb, and, yeah, probably so full of cum. Who can blame her? We all did.
