The Angry Zen of Matt Dillon

In junior high, in the leafy suburbs of Mamaroneck, about an hour north of Manhattan, Dillon hung out with the misfits. He had four brothers (among them Kevin, nearly two years younger and now a big star himself, on HBO's Entourage, playing an actor long overshadowed by his actor brother, not too different from real life) and a sister and a nine-to-five businessman dad and a stay-at-home mom. He was fourteen and had already developed a fondness for cigarettes (the same brand as his pop's, Chesterfields), booze and weed. "I was a little bit ahead of the game for most people," he likes to say. He loitered in restaurant parking lots and got into fistfights. "I would fight in a second," he says. "It wasn't out of rage. It was an adrenaline thing and the machismo and everything." His friends were Italian toughs with names like Anthony and Bruno. One day, late as usual, he was making his way to art class when he saw these two adults talking to a few students. He didn't know who they were and didn't care. He avoided them. Then they saw him.

"Hey! Can we talk to you for a second?"

"Uh, eh, what do you want?"

"We're making a film and looking for people to be in it."

"A movie? Really?"

In the days that followed, Dillon took the Metro-North train into Manhattan multiple times to audition for a movie about troubled teenagers titled Over the Edge. One rainy afternoon, before the trip, he got into a fistfight ("I'd say I came out on top") and arrived soaking wet, with his shirt ripped. He had those two busted front teeth. He eased up to a mirror, hauled out his comb and slicked his hair back sweet, like right out of an early Bruce Springsteen song -- much to the delight of the movie people, who thought he looked perfect, with the perfect attitude to go with it. They began ad-libbing, the adults as cops, Dillon as a mouthy punk.

"What does your dad do?"

"He's a fucking businessman."

"What does your mother do?"

"She don't do shit."

"More of that!" director Jonathan Kaplan shouted happily. "Yeah! Curse more. Yeah!"

Dillon got the job and from then on knew what he wanted to do with his life. Twice a week he took acting classes in Manhattan, at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. Afterward, he'd further educate himself by seeing movies like On the Waterfront and Rebel Without a Cause, and then he might go out to clubs like CBGB, Max's Kansas City and the Mudd Club, where he rubbed shoulders with Andy Warhol and Sylvia Miles. And then there was his other world -- "hanging out in the park," says Dillon, "fucking up in school, getting loaded with my friends, listening to rock music. Nothing heavy, but kind of heavy when you think about where that leads. Imagine being in a bedroom with a friend who's a year older, and he starts fixing up right in front of you. Liquid morphine. Like it was nothing. Yeah, I was a little wild and on a course for misspent youth, you know what I mean? But my parents made it very clear what was unacceptable, and that saved me. I have to be honest. I got out lucky."

He pauses to collect his thoughts and then says what he often says at moments like this: "I normally wouldn't talk about it. But I can talk about it now, because time has passed."

When Dillon's second movie, Little Darlings, was released, he almost instantly became a teen idol, appearing on the cover of magazines like Tiger Beat, which posed goofy questions such as, "Can you give him all the love he needs -- and wants?" Determined to find out, chicks cruised by his house day and night and dropped by his school in their Camaros to see if he could come out for a ride and maybe make out a little. This was good stuff. But for the most part, Dillon wasn't happy: "As far as the hype and the fame thing, the novelty wears off pretty quick. And I hated the perceived lack of respect. Heartthrob? Teen idol? Nobody wants to be called that shit. It wasn't what I was about. And it wasn't anything I was ever comfortable with, period."