James Toback, who has been Downey's friend since the two of them made "The Pick-Up Artist," gave the actor his best role to date in his dicey and exciting improvisatory drama "Two Girls and a Guy" (1999). Downey plays Blake Allen, a New York actor living comfortably off his family money in a Soho loft. Just after the movie starts, Blake discovers the two young women he's been seeing (Heather Graham and Natasha Gregson Wagner) have found out about each other. It's a role tailor-made for Downey the farceur, the ladies' man caught up in his own lies. But what starts out as farce turns into psychodrama.

Toback had conceived of the role after seeing Downey following the actor's first stint in rehab. What he saw was a man trying to please everyone -- just as Blake is. He insists to his two lovers that he meant every word he ever told them (including that each was the only woman he desired) and it's not a lie. He does believe everything that comes out of his mouth at the moment -- even if he contradicts it minutes later. The role has the heat of gossip -- we know full well watching it that Downey is drawing on whatever private hell he had gone through, especially in a stunning, uncomfortable scene where Downey looks in the mirror to deliver a self-lacerating monologue: "Is this how you want to live the rest of your life? Just damaging people around you, damaging yourself?"

Part of the thrill of the movie is that we're being given a glimpse behind the scenes into Downey's psyche. But the movie never becomes cheap or exploitative. Downey is using his experience to dig into the part of an actor who's always acting, always on, always looking for corners to duck around in the argument. He's playing a privileged, fucked-up kid, and what's fucked-up about him is inseparable from his charisma.

But Downey uses the role's "am I acting or am I sincere?" games less as a hall of mirrors than as a well that he keeps descending into deeper and deeper until his final scene, a sustained expression of grief that may be one of the rawest scenes any contemporary actor has ever put on film.

Only a fool would predict where Robert Downey Jr. will go from here, whether the acclaim for his work on "Ally McBeal" will buoy him or whether he'll go back to his old habits. It's not, however, the critic's job to even attempt to say. I wish him well, and I pray he has years of work ahead of him. But I wish that he could be talked of in terms of the 15 brilliant years of work that are behind him instead of just as Hollywood's beloved screw-up. There's a moment in his sly, wily performance in last year's "Wonder Boys" that, even if he had never garnered a tabloid headline, would stand for the position of an original, idiosyncratic actor in Hollywood. Downey's failed literary agent is telling Michael Douglas' failed author that the people he works with treat him as if he doesn't exist. "I guess I just don't fit the new corporate profile," he says. When Douglas asks him what that is, he pauses a minute and blurts out, as if it were the most absurd thing ever, "Competence," and the two of them burst into laughter.

Maybe to feel that line in your gut, you have to have worked in a job that you love to do and watched while passion and dedication became less valued than successful mediocrity. But the triumph of the laugh that follows it is beautiful. It bursts the boundaries of the character; it's the triumph of an actor who, in his craft, has not been smoothed over or made salable. Where Robert Downey Jr. will be this time next year I won't venture to guess. Artistically, I'll tell you now, were he never to act again, he'd be the last man standing of his generation.

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