I was 11 years old when The Client debuted in theaters. I saw it with my father, sister and brother on opening weekend. It was my Dad’s weekend and he’d just begun feeling out the concept of “his weekend,” what to do with three kids figuring post-divorce life. Because he was crashing in a spare room at his buddy’s house, we were crashing on the floor of a spare room in his buddy’s house. So, with little else to do, and almost no mention of what was happening among us, we went to the movies a lot. When we weren’t going to the movies, we were renting movies. The Client may not have been the first movie we saw as a unit, the four of us, but it was at the beginning. The Client is weirdly emblematic of that period. Brad Renfro’s tough-teen veneer is scarily honest, earned. Susan Sarandon, as she so often was in those early ’90s days, was fiercely smart and looking better (despite pushing 50) than she probably had to. The plot is Grisham muck and Joel Schumacher’s direction is point and click potboiler, but Renfro, in his first ever on-screen role, was an identifiable person to me: pissed at his luck, intense, making trouble despite his intelligence. The Client would show up often on HBO in the years after and I’d rarely start watching without finishing; it stuck to me like dried honey.

Brad Renfro died today. He was born exactly one day before me.