Robert Downey Jr.

His future's uncertain, but even if Hollywood's beloved screw-up never acts again, he'll stand as the most talented actor of his generation.

By Charles Taylor

Apr 10, 2001 | There is an image at the beginning of Mike Figgis' 1997 film "One Night Stand" that seems to sum up the public's perception of Robert Downey Jr. He stands on a stage, dressed in jeans and black tank top, looking gaunt and haunted, his arms outstretched at his sides while magnesium flares go off around him. It's the image of a hipster Christ crucified for his art.

Applied to Downey (as opposed to the character he's playing) it's a false, romantic image -- the myth of the helpless genius whose creativity is inseparable from his self-destructiveness. It doesn't take much to see that Downey's self-destructiveness has interfered with his creativity; it's already robbed him and us of years of work, and stands to rob us of even more if he is convicted on his latest round of drug charges.

More and more, though, public figures and events are not talked about as they actually are but are shunted into ready-made scenarios. Anything that would unravel the constructed image is simply ignored. And what could be more ready-made for easy consumption than a talented young actor with a drug problem? The tendency with Downey is to see him as either a victim or a joke. I've witnessed the latter at critics' screenings of movies like "Two Girls and a Guy" and especially "The Gingerbread Man," where Downey's character, a boozing private investigator, was greeted with laughter, as if playing that role didn't take any acting, as if his private troubles were no more than late-night monologue fodder.

Just as sickening is the hand-wringing, "isn't it a tragedy" manner that the press has used to report Downey's troubles. At each of Downey's arrests or trial dates, the entertainment whores on E! or ET or on your local news have adopted their stern, grave tones and asked what can be done for Robert Downey Jr. What they will never do is question the assumption that people can be saved from their own worst impulses, which, being the basis of our drug laws, has certainly contributed to Downey's problem.

There may even be a bit of the worst-cast scenario tendency hanging over devoting a profile such as this one to a performer still only in his late 30s -- as if the piece should be written before it's time to do an obituary. So let me be clear at the outset: It's crucial to shift the focus on Robert Downey Jr. back to his work, as befits the most talented actor of his generation.

At one time that title might have gone to Nicolas Cage or Sean Penn. But Cage has scaled back on the wonderful oddities that made him unlike anyone else on screen, even in dreck like "The Rock" and "Con Air." And Penn, a brilliant actor, is sometimes erratically eccentric (as in his cameo in last year's "Before Night Falls") and seems intent on devoting his energy to his directing, which has neither the spontaneity, the clarity nor the excitement of his acting.

Downey has never consciously played the eccentric or outsider just as he has never seemed a part of the mainstream, though much of his career has been in mainstream movies. There was no telling what to make of him when he first showed up in comedies like "Weird Science" (1985) or "Back to School" (1986). In the latter movie, with his lace cravats, new-wave hair (a few blue spikes added for dash) and big, fey doe eyes, he looked like some parody of a kid in a Keane painting, a college boy who couldn't decide whether he wanted to be Lord Byron or join Duran Duran. His manner was smiling, ingratiating -- at times he seemed so eager to please he practically batted his eyes -- yet there was also something secretive about his pleased little smile; you couldn't be sure what he was laughing at, but he wore his amusement like a a snug, comfy coat. He was an alluring and not particularly trustworthy puppy.

Next Page: "Less Than Zero," where he was first willing to lay himself bare

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