Twenty-five years ago, River Phoenix lay on the cold pavement of a Hollywood sidewalk, steps away from a famous nightclub, suffering from an overdose of heroin and cocaine. While a crowd of gawkers in Halloween costumes gathered around him and his younger brother Joaquin called 911, inside the nightclub—the Viper Room—Johnny Depp was onstage with his band P, playing a song about Hollywood celebrity. Spookily, it name-checked Phoenix: “I finally talked to Michael Stipe / But I didn’t get to see his car / Him and River Phoenix / Were leaving on the road tomorrow.”

At 1:51 A.M. on October 31, 1993, River Phoenix was pronounced dead. He was just 23 years old. It was a tragedy for those who knew and loved him, and a shattering event for all the young fans who had hung posters of him on their walls, and for all the moviegoers who had been moved by his performances. It marked the end of a short but prolific career, encompassing 13 movies and one short-lived TV series. In life, River Phoenix was still figuring out what kind of movie star he wanted to be: pinup boy, hippie idol, scruffy activist? Now the question was asked all over again: what kind of icon would he be in death?

The assumption of many Hollywood observers was that Phoenix would take his place in the cinematic pantheon as the “vegan James Dean”: a symbol of restless youth, encumbered with more talent and beauty than he knew what to do with, coming to an abrupt, early end. That didn’t happen.

One reason was the unusual contours of the Phoenix filmography: after you stripped away the dreck (Little Nikita) and the moderately interesting flops (The Mosquito Coast), four excellent films remain where he had a starring role. Dogfight was a lyrical two-hander with Lili Taylor about an unlikely encounter shared by a coffee-shop waitress and a U.S. Marine shipping out to Vietnam. Running on Empty earned Phoenix an Oscar nomination for his performance as a piano prodigy who was the son of 1960s radicals perpetually in hiding from the federal government. Neither film was a hit; both are mostly forgotten today. His tough-but-vulnerable role in Stand by Me launched his career, but because he was just 14 years old at the time he made the movie, we don’t necessarily feel like we’re watching the same person who O.D.’d as an adult. His performance as Mike Waters, the narcoleptic street hustler in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, remains iconic, and groundbreaking in the history of queer cinema—but the movie is rarely seen now, maybe because there’s no easy way to coherently cut it down for basic cable.

Nobody in 1993, however, could have predicted the primary reason that Phoenix didn’t transform into a golden legend after he died: the events of April 5, 1994. In the carpeted room above a garage in Seattle, Kurt Cobain pointed a shotgun at his own head and pulled the trigger. Apparently the 1990s had room for just one beautiful blond boy who symbolized youthful tragedy, and Cobain was it.

So if Phoenix isn’t the “vegan James Dean” or even the “Kurt Cobain of Hollywood,” what is he?

Human beings are complex organisms, believing many different things—only some of them contradictory—over the course of a lifetime. In death, they often get reduced to one quality, like a supporting character in a newspaper comic strip. Animal-rights advocates might remember Phoenix as a vegan pioneer. (Veganism was so unusual when he began advocating for it that some magazines instead referred to him as “ultravegetarian.”) Environmentalists can honor Phoenix’s efforts to buy up swaths of rainforest, one of the first Hollywood stars to do so. Fellow cult survivors may draw lessons from Phoenix’s childhood in the Children of God and the sexual abuse he suffered as a result of its doctrines.