He pauses to consider his own story. “Does that seem believable? Really? Because if somebody told me that, I’d be like, ‘You’re 7 years old [in fact, he was 10]. You really had a knowing of what the fuck you were?’ ”

Dissatisfied with life in Los Angeles, the Phoenixes moved back to Florida, settling in Gainesville, and River bought the family a ranch in Costa Rica.

As River’s fame grew with Running on Empty, about a family of ’60s radicals on the run, and an Indiana Jones movie, playing a young Indy, Joaquin wasn’t getting any appealing offers and took a break to hang out on a beach with his dad in Mexico, learning Spanish and riding motorcycles. After he returned to the States, his brother was shooting the indie classic My Own Private Idaho with director Gus Van Sant. River began tutoring his younger brother about cinema. “My brother came home and he was like, ‘We need to watch this movie called Raging Bull.’ And I’m like, ‘What?’ Prior to that, I watched Caddyshack and Spaceballs. And Woody Allen comedies.”

Not long after, he recalls his brother making a strange prediction. “He suggested I change my name [back to Joaquin] and then, I don’t know, six months later, whatever it was, we were in Florida, we were in the kitchen, and he said, ‘You’re going to be an actor and you’re going to be more well known than I am.’ Me and my mom looked at each other like, ‘What the fuck is he talking about?’

“I don’t know why he said that or what he knew of me at the time. I hadn’t been acting at all. But he also said it with a certain weight, with a knowing that seemed so absurd to me at the time, but of course now, in hindsight, you’re like, ‘How the fuck did he know?’ ”

When he was 16, Phoenix says, he was sent a dead frog in the mail to dissect for his biology studies, which prompted him to discontinue his studies. When his parents protested, he dared them “to have me arrested.” (His mother says she doesn’t recall this.) Around that time, he appeared in Ron Howard’s Parenthood as a brooding, inarticulate adolescent grappling with his budding sexuality. Heart remembers her son’s intense emotional commitment to the part, especially in a scene where Joaquin’s character trashed his father’s dental office and broke down crying. Afterward, she says, “I had to come on the set and hold him, because he just inhabited what he believed that young child felt.”

“IT’S GOING TO BE OKAY, BUBBELEH,” DE NIRO SAID TO PHOENIX.

Phoenix says that he and his siblings were not frequent denizens of clubs like the Viper Room. His brother had gone there in 1993, and reportedly stayed in hopes of playing music. “I don’t think it was typical. To be honest, I don’t think it was really—I don’t think it’s what he would have wanted to have done with his night. He’d, just before that, spent time just playing me new songs that he’d written.”

After River’s death, the family retreated to Costa Rica to escape the media glare as the tragedy metastasized into a cautionary tale of young Hollywood and became a never-ending stream of myth and conspiracy. “We just walked away from everything,” says Heart. “It was horrendous. The newspapers, we didn’t see any of that, we just walked away.”

The family grieved in private for months. The first time any of the Phoenixes emerged from the Costa Rica compound was when Joaquin and his mother flew to New York so Joaquin could try out for a part in Gus Van Sant’s latest film, To Die For, starring Nicole Kidman. (The casting assistant on the film, Meredith Tucker, still says his audition was the best she has ever seen.) When he arrived in New York, Phoenix hadn’t acted in three or four years. “As soon as I saw him, I started crying,” Van Sant says. “I didn’t realize that would happen but it was pretty sad.”