River runs through him

Joaquin Phoenix peers out from the cover of the July 30 Entertainment Weekly as if he were impersonating Frodo Baggins. His eyes are as hooded as his head is, yet his gaze says everything.

It says: I am movie star, like my décor?

Or does it? Joaquin Phoenix, who has a role in M. Night Shyamalan’s film “The Village,” which opens today, is a hot item in Hollywood. A list of his credits is impressive by anyone’s standards: “Parenthood,” “To Die For,” “Inventing the Abbotts,” “Gladiator,” “Quills,” “Signs.”

Not bad for a kid who wasn’t even his family’s most talented member.

That honor belonged to his older brother, the late River Phoenix.

Anyone who is at least 25 remembers River Phoenix. He played Chris Chambers, the tough kid with the fatal sense of compassion in the 1986 film “Stand By Me.”

Phoenix was hardly the best-known of the four actors who starred in Rob Reiner’s film; that honor belonged to Corey Feldman. Phoenix didn’t even have the biggest role; Wil Wheaton, famous for doing a couple of seasons on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” was the central character.

Yet even then, at age 13, Phoenix showed the kind of screen presence that all leading men have.

His performance in “Stand By Me” is all the more impressive when you consider that, just the year before, he portrayed the nerdy Wolfgang Muller in “Explorers,” a film whose star was another future leading-man: Ethan Hawke.

How different are the two characters? Put it this way: Wolfgang Muller is to Chris Chambers what Volkswagen’s Bug is to a Dodge truck.

And that was just one measure of Phoenix’s versatility.

The same year “Stand By Me” was released, Phoenix appeared in Peter Weir’s “Mosquito Coast.” The news peg concerning the movie was that it resembled the Phoenix family story – parents serving as missionaries, five children born in various spots around the world (Joaquin in Puerto Rico, River in Madras, Ore.), disciplined family life (strictly vegan diet).

The film didn’t do well (Weir couldn’t decide whether Dad, played by Harrison Ford, was merely eccentric or a man going slowly insane), but Phoenix graduated to other roles. In “Little Nikita” (1988) he played the son of a pair of secret agents.

And that same year, in “Running on Empty,” he again played the son of a couple in hiding. Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti starred as former student activists of the 1960s who, having participated in the protest bombing of a research lab, are on the lam.

Each family member, including Danny (Phoenix) and his younger brother (played by Jonas Abry), is trained to pick up and leave whenever his cover has been blown. Constantly moving, always changing their identities, the boys are fated never to have normal childhoods.

But then Danny, who is a musical prodigy, approaches the age at which he should be applying to college. And to complicate matters even more, he falls in love (with Martha Plimpton).

While everyone in the film is good, especially Lahti, Phoenix is the focus. And as Roger Ebert wrote, he “essentially carries the story.”

Phoenix pulled off two more performances worth mentioning. The first was in “My Own Private Idaho,” Gus Van Sant’s uneven film about Portland street hustlers. Phoenix is Mike, a gay narcoleptic in search of the mother he never knew.

The other is “Dogfight” (1991), a film set in 1963 with Phoenix cast as a Marine named Eddie. On the eve of his departure to Vietnam, Eddie embarrasses Lili Taylor by picking her up as part of a game (the Marine with the ugliest date wins). When Eddie discovers that he actually likes the girl, he has to convince her that he isn’t the jerk that she thinks he is.

Phoenix appeared in a handful of other films, his last one being Sam Shepard’s 1994 experimental Western, “Silent Tongue,” in which a critic for Rolling Stone wrote that Phoenix “infuses the role with a uniquely raw intensity.”

That, of course, was the same kind of feeling captured in the news stories about Phoenix’s death from a drug overdose outside Los Angeles’s Viper Club, several months before “Silent Tongue” was released.

It was a loss similar to other dead-before-their-time movie stars. James Dean, for example.

Returning to Joaquin Phoenix’s magazine-cover gaze, what he seems really to be saying is, “This one’s for you, bro.”