Stand by Me (1986) on Netflix

Upon reading of the death of one of his childhood friends, late thirty-something Gordie Lachance remembers back to an incident when he was twelve involving that friend. His story... It's just before the Labor Day weekend 1959 in his hometown of Castle Rock, Oregon, just before he is about to enter junior high. He, an insecure young man, feels more invisible at home than usual as it's five months after the tragic death of his older brother Denny, the favored son, who he loved and misses as much as anyone. His parents, who just don't understand Gordie's love of storytelling and writing as opposed to Denny's athletic pursuits, still have not gotten over their grief. Gordie spends much time with his three closest same aged friends, who attend school together. Vern Tessio is the slightly dim overweight one, that dimness largely out of naivety. Teddy Duchamp is the crazy one, whose father is also crazy albeit violently, even against Teddy. And Chris Chambers, Gordie's best friend, has in the public mindset a predetermined future as a lowlife, being just the latest lowlife in the Chambers family. Regardless, Chris acts more as a responsible father figure to Gordie in many ways than Gordie's own father. Vern learns from secretly overhearing his older delinquent brother Billy's conversation that he has discovered a dead body in the woods about twenty or thirty miles away, but does not want to do anything about it or tell anyone, especially in authority. With Vern telling his three friends, the four believe it is probably Ray Brower, a boy around their age from another town who went missing three days ago while going blueberry picking. Needing to walk there, they decide to go retrieve the body and thus become heroes in the process. They devise a plan of attack that will give them about twenty-four hours before their respective families may even realize that they are gone. What the four don't realize is that Billy does eventually tell his group of friends, led by the sadistic Ace Merrill, who has a win at any cost mentality, and as such it becomes a race to retrieve the body. But in their physical journey, the four boys also go through an emotional journey about their lives, their friendship and for Gordie why he has what becomes an obsession to see that dead body.