My Own Private Idaho

My Own Private Idaho is a story about a narcoleptic gay male hustler. This is an ambitious movie; a movie about roots and rootlessness, about reclaiming the past and seizing the future, about the ways of the street and the life of the road, about wishes and memories and swimming upstream (like the salmon we see in montages at both the beginning and end of the movie). Themes and passages from Henry IV are reworked into modern English and these connections to the Bard are both the movie's glory and stumbling block. My Own Private Idaho is a movie that takes risks and some of them work better than others. But it's a daredevil's ride that keeps you glued with fascination.