Usually, coming of age stories deal with teenagers graduating from high school, even college in some cases, and more and more recently there have been variations on the coming of age story among late-blooming adults. Movies like Stand By Me are rare in that they treat the formative experiences of one’s childhood in a way that doesn’t dumb down the meaning or misrepresent the emotions of events, and maintains a balance between capturing the feeling of looking back, of the present looking past, as well as bringing the feelings of the past into the present, if that makes sense.
As a movie about pre-adolescent boys, and drawing from my own experience as a former pre-adolescent boy, this has to be one of the most realistic portrayals of that age group ever to be put to film. Plot mechanics aside, though these are one of the movie’s sources of strength, it’s the moment to moment relationships between these young characters that resonate the most and hold the most truth, even more than 25 years after the film was released.
Continue reading on the next page…