A couple of weeks after watching the TV drama Adolescence, I found myself sitting down for a family viewing of Stand by Me – a 1986 coming-of-age movie that I have seen many times but had not revisited for at least two decades. The film, directed by Rob Reiner and based on a Stephen King novella, follows 12-year-old Gordie Lachance (Wil Wheaton) and his three friends in a hot 1959 summer in small-town Oregon, as they go on a quest to find the body of a missing local kid. What struck me this time was not the remarkable young cast, immaculate storytelling, ingeniously filthy insults or peerless jukebox soundtrack but the way the film skilfully unpicks the same knotted core of adolescent masculinity we are still worrying over. The “positive male role model” – a concept convincingly demolished in a recent piece by my colleague George Monaghan – is absent; the dominant strain of masculinity is what would now be called “toxic”.
The kids’ fathers are alcoholic, abusive or, in Gordie’s case, ruined by grief for his dead eldest son. Teddy (Corey Feldman) is the only boy who idolises his dad – but the version who “stormed the beach at Normandy”, not the man who pressed his son’s ear to the stove and is now in a mental institution. In a town seemingly frozen in time, the older youths – led by Kiefer Sutherland’s sinister Ace – have curdled into cruelty. The adults’ low expectations have infected the boys: stung by a betrayal of trust by a teacher, Gordie’s best friend Chris (River Phoenix) sees their future lives unroll in a bleak vision of human diminishment.
The tragic coda to Stand by Me is not as crushing as it is in King’s original – in which the four friends are brutally punished for exerting their independence, and only one survives into adulthood – though it never fails to move me. Hope is found in the closeness between the boys, particularly Gordie and Chris: denied expression everywhere else, their vulnerabilities are eventually shared; denied validation from anyone else, they find it in each other. The film may not have anything to say about smartphones, but almost 40 years on it still has plenty to say about being a boy, and becoming a man.
A rather different model of masculinity was under the microscope at a launch party in Soho for my colleague Kate Mossman’s book Men of a Certain Age. The book collects the perceptive, funny and deeply original profiles she has written for the New Statesman over the past decade – and the Word magazine before that – to form a study of the ageing male rock star. How does Kate get under her subjects’ skin? Having edited many of her pieces, I’ve often asked myself this question.
In an on-stage conversation with the Guardian’s rock and pop critic Alexis Petridis, she wondered if her gender has helped her bypass the competitive, macho nature of many rock interviews. Perhaps, but it doesn’t explain the brilliance of Kate’s prose, in which Johnny Rotten’s accent is “part Albert Steptoe, part Uriah Heep” and Gene Simmons of Kiss, in a gold shirt in a Moscow hotel room, looks “like Gaddafi at leisure”. At the end of the event, Petridis admitted never before had a book made him so sick with professional envy. In the audience, the male music critics of a certain age were, for once, in total agreement.
“The most alienating part of the traditional teenager narrative,” Kate wrote in these pages last week, “is the part that says we want to listen to the music our parents hate.” This struck a chord with me, at both ends of the equation. I’ve found that even if I initially resist the music my children love, I can’t help but come around to it eventually (which is how I find myself in unexpected situations such as reviewing an Olivia Rodrigo concert for the New Statesman). Growing up, when I took over the stereo to play something electronic or abrasive, my dad would invariably find some point of connection. Did I realise that this noisy big-beat number samples the Who? Or that this sweary wig-out is quoting Steely Dan? When I went to see the Northern Irish rap duo Kneecap last year, in a venue filled with young fans, I spotted two grizzled dads at the back. “Reminded me of Public Enemy in Hammersmith in 1987,” one said approvingly as we filed out. Rebel all you want, kids – there’s nothing new under the sun.
When I asked Julian Barnes about his time at the New Statesman he told me that he had “a lot of serious fun”. Barnes, who reflects on the evolution of his political identity on page 42, belongs to a literary golden age in this publication’s history, having served as deputy literary editor and TV critic in the late 1970s. I joined the New Statesman just after its centenary in 2013, and have since met several alumni, including Barnes’s former boss Martin Amis. As Amis rolled a cigarette outside Grayson Perry’s studio – they were about to sit down for a conversation, for Perry’s guest edit of the magazine in 2014 – I asked him about his time running the books pages. I was half-expecting a droll deflection, but he replied earnestly: it was utterly absorbing, he said, so much so that it risked derailing his career as a novelist. Editing the New Statesman over the past few months, I have been reminded of these verdicts. It has been a privilege, and a lot of serious fun.
Tom Gatti is acting editor of the New Statesman
[See also: The Europeans who built Britain]
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025