How silly can you get? Val Kilmer, 1959-2025

Val Kilmer is dying on stage, or at least trying to. His love for a girl — each one of the hundreds in the screaming audience — is too much. He’s sticking a noose around his neck, he’s thrusting his head into an oven, he’s sprawling across inexplicable train tracks as he desperately croons “Spend This Night With Me,” an Elvis send-up that he and the ZAZ writers/directors of 1984’s Top Secret! are playing completely sincerely even as it’s completely ridiculous. Kilmer’s lead role as Nick Rivers is one of the greatest debuts in cinema, singing and dancing and completely attuned to the film’s comedic sensitivity while pushing it forward with his own energy. He is seriously silly.

“Kilmer was hilarious in many movies, but he rarely ever got to be in things that were just silly and playful,” Israel Daramola wrote in a tribute today, after Kilmer died yesterday at the age of 65. I think that is mostly right, Kilmer did not make a lot of straight-up comedies. But the way he brought that sense of playfulness, of absurdity, to his roles is why they resonate so strongly with viewers. Kevin Jarre may have written it, but could anyone but Kilmer have delivered “I’ll be your huckleberry?” His Doc Holiday steals all of Tombstone away from the tough guys that make up the cast with his raised-eye dandyisms and refusal to fully buy into their bluster — although there is nothing funny about his guns talking. It’s the same honesty Rivers brings to his songs, where the acknowledgement of silliness does not counter but co-exists with and reinforces the sincerity.

It’s there in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, where his Gay Perry is both a very funny person (especially in his exasperation) and also a person who knows how others perceive him as a joke. It’s in Spartan, where Kilmer is entirely within the rhythm of David Mamet’s dialogue and yet by virtue of being Val Kilmer and having that almost ingenuous star aura, he gives it a tone of knowing and accepting mastery of this staccato style rather than the lived-in lines of regular Mametians (and this pays off when he is thrown for a loop midway through the movie). You can’t play Jim Morrison, Bozo Dionysus himself, without embracing the power of pretension and how it can veer stupid or sublime; and you can’t play off Bob Dylan the way Kilmer does as a mysterious rabbit butcher in Masked & Anonymous without somehow finding the fervent truth in Dylan’s gnomic dialogue. Stifling this is what makes his Batman in Batman Forever a dud, in a movie that has so much buffoonery both sanctioned and not he misses the West-ian standard for something too dull and straight. Contra Iceman in Top Gun, a performance on the brink of parody but without any winks in its aggressive cockiness. For all of his wildness on and off set, again and again Kilmer was able to calibrate these seeming contradictions into something true.

The truest moment in Heat comes right before the shootout that blows the movie wide open. Kilmer is a god of death in that sequence, and apparently his reloading technique is professional-grade, but it’s his reaction coming out of the bank that always makes me gasp — he sees the gathering police and immediately, IMMEDIATELY raises his gun and opens fire. It is a person acting at the speed of thought and precision of muscle, a moment defined by the complete absence of that absurdity that Kilmer acknowledges elsewhere and that absence is its own tangible thing. It’s a split second, it is the entire movie.

But that’s the only time I can think of where his playfulness is completely gone, even though it may be threatened. In Real Genius, Kilmer somehow plays an incredibly handsome and athletic and friendly and above all cool nerd, a beautiful mind in a surf bum’s body, and how he threads this needle is by embracing the silliness of the world — until the reality of the world’s evil CIA weapons programs and even more evil collaborating professors intrudes, and Kilmer’s fear of being used by these forces is the nervous thrum under his happy-go-lucky shenanigans. But he and his friends ultimately save the day, and of all the wonderful performances and moments Kilmer gave us maybe this is a good one to end with: a young man rejecting the idea of ruling the world and instead blowing up a house with popcorn. How silly. How beautiful.