The Angry Zen of Matt Dillon

Dillon's made quite a slippery-slidey name for himself during his twenty-eight years in the moviemaking business. No sooner does he get tagged a Tiger Beat-worthy teen idol for his first starring-role film, Little Darlings (1980), than he factors in a twist of angst-ridden rebel, with Francis Ford Coppola's twin 1983 adaptations of S.E. Hinton's novels The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, than he displays a flair for comedy, in The Flamingo Kid (1984), than he fades into B-movie obscurity for a few years, then returns spectacularly, by shading himself dark as a likable junkie in Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy (1989), than he finds himself drifting once more, than he returns triumphant in the classic sicko comedy There's Something About Mary (1998, as a funky-toothed, dog-electrocuting detective) and the sexed-up noir drama Wild Things (1998). From there, he fades yet again and nearly loses his marbles, while struggling to make his own movie, the melancholy caper flick City of Ghosts (2003), which earns only around $300,000 at the box office. After that, he gets paid doodly-squat to play that bigoted LAPD cop in Crash and a similar amount for Factotum, demands a handsome fee to appear with Lindsay Lohan and a Volkswagen in Herbie: Fully Loaded, and in 2006 becomes bankable once again, due to his Oscar nomination, only to then make his first outing of the year in the great big summer stinker You, Me and Dupree. It's not a unique journey by Hollywood standards, but it does amply illustrate his long-standing ability to confound the pigeonholers; only Johnny Depp does it better.

And because of this steadfast refusal to play the game -- he lives in Manhattan, doesn't even own a place in L.A. -- his acting peers tend to gush over him. "Matt makes his choices based on things other than money and fame," they say. And, "The character choices he makes . . . there's an artist in his heart." And, most spectacularly, from Cameron Diaz, in the midst of their three-year love affair in the late Nineties: "Matty, he's the best. He's one of a kind. . . . He's never taken that commercial route. He's an intelligent, poetic, full, real human being. And he's down-to-earth. Matt is the greatest!"

He's also pretty good with the one-liners ("You know, more and more I don't have one-night stands," he says. "I have four- or five-night stands"). At the same time, though, he often says puzzling things like "Not that I have anything to hide, but there's lots of things I don't want to talk about. Like, why do people need to know about my life?"

Well, because it may suggest explanations that might not be self-evident.

"Growing up, I wasn't a great student," he says at one point. "When I was seven, I'd get these really bad hallucinatory fevers. I remember once seeing a print of this woman wearing a huge hat, and I could see her head just caught on fire. Flames. Flames. It turned out that I had a blockage in my bladder and had to have an operation and was out of school a lot. So, for me, I've always had this feeling that I didn't know what I was talking about or what I was doing. Nobody ever said I was dumb. I often impressed teachers, a surprise. But I sort of heard that stuff in my head." He drums his fingers on the table and shrugs, like it's no big deal, but those kinds of voices are always a big deal, if only because they influence how you act and, most especially, how you react to the great big wonderful world around you.