Last week while walking on Fourth Street in Long Beach, I stumbled upon Casita Bookstore where I discovered “Keanu Reeves Most Triumphant: The Movies and Meaning of an Irrepressible Icon” by the Los Angeles-based writer Alex Pappademas. Like Keith Phipps’s recent “The Age of Cage: Four Decades of Hollywood Through One Singular Career,” Pappademas’s 2022 book is a work of both film criticism and film biography. Phipps’s book found recurring motifs in Nicolas Cage’s films while describing Cage’s life at the time of each film’s production. Pappdemas takes a similar approach with the movie star Keannu Reeves and analyzes the Reeves films he picks largely in the chronological order in which they were released.
“Keanu Reeves Most Triumphant” is both funny and sad. Pappademas opens his book by describing his introduction to Reeves for a 2019 magazine profile and Reeves’ befuddlement at Pappademas’s description of the layout of his home. This anecdote establishes the concerns of the book: Reeves’s public persona based on kindness and generosity, his difficulty just being a person when he can’t go anywhere without people recognizing him, and our shared collective difficulty in feeling heard and understood. While Reeves can be an outsized performer and, like Nicolas Cage, a bit of a joke, “Keanu Reeves Most Triumphant” also explores some well-known painful facts about Reeves including his father’s imprisonment, the stillborn death of his child, and the fatal car accident death of his child’s mother.
I enjoyed Pappademas’s book and devoured its 301 pages in a week. My only complaint is that Pappademas might as well have covered every Keanu Reeves project for a book of this length. Reeves’s Zen teacher performance in “Thumbsucker,” very much keeping with his sage screen persona, is overlooked. Pappademas also neglects Reeves’s personal connection to the band Sonic Youth, who once played in the middle of an ice skating rink for a Reeves birthday party. Overall, Pappademas has written a book that is fun, funny, sad, and interesting like its subject.
Aden Thomas Jordan 