Almost on the up and Crudup

He's 32. He lives in Manhattan. He's made 10 movies in four years, but you probably haven't seen them. He wishes you would. He'd prefer you saw more theatre, too, because he's a stage actor at heart.

Five years ago, he landed a lead role on Broadway straight out of NYU grad school, in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. He won an Outer Critics' Circle Award for that one. And ever since the camera first closed in on his face, people have predicted that Billy Crudup will be a movie star.

His 11th film, out this month, is Almost Famous. It took writer-director Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire) several years to come up with that title, and it suits both the story and the star.

At 15, Crowe bluffed his way into writing for Rolling Stone magazine and the year after went on the road with the Allman Brothers Band. The film is an epic love letter to that 1970s adolescence: witty, romantic, and heart-rending. Crudup plays Russell Hammond, the lead guitarist of Stillwater, a fictional rock band on the rise. Charismatic and passionate, Hammond secretly believes that he is the real source of Stillwater's success. But when his own fame begins to eclipse the band's, he hates it.

"He wants to be uncluttered," Crudup says. "He wants the music to speak for itself, but ego, fans, the record industry, are starting to get in the way." These are parallel concerns for Crudup. "Acting, drama, it's important in my life, and I want to believe that I'm doing something valuable with my energy," he says. "I don't understand what a lifestyle of fame gets you." Well, a jet for one thing. "What am I going to do with a ****ing jet, man? My occupation is to make people believe that I'm somebody else. I don't want people to know too much about me. Fame makes my job just that much harder."

Most of them are lying when they say this. Hollywood teems with almost-famous actors who smile and rake their fingers through their hair and tell you they don't want to be movie stars. Most of them are lying.

Crudup could be lying, too, of course. Except that he politely declined when asked to audition for the lead in Titanic. Except that his choices, both in the roles he pursues and how he chooses to play them, reveal a man with an agenda divorced from mainstream popularity.

On the surface, his list of characters reads like a standard leading man's rap sheet: a randy, working-class stud in Inventing the Abbotts; an Olympic track star in Without Limits, a high-plains cowboy in The Hi-Lo Country; a handsome young politician in Waking the Dead; a rock guitarist with smouldering mystique in Almost Famous. But beneath the two-second descriptions lies an unhappy lot. Embittered, brooding, arrogant, or morally anaemic men, these characters all strive for something honourable that they can't quite grasp and fail because of their own weaknesses. Not the sort of heroes, in other words, that inspire $20-million opening weekends.

"It's when people want to do good, and can't, that interests me," Crudup says. "Failing as a way of succeeding, it's what makes people human, so I keep searching for characters that make big mistakes." He may have reached the apex of that search earlier this year with Jesus' Son, playing a gentle lost soul named F***head. "He's a junkie and a petty thief," Crudup says. "But he's got this incredible empathy. He's one of the few people who, if you met him, would make you feel whole as a human being, because he recognises something in everybody and gives it back to them as a gift."

Everything Crudup does seems considered. In person, he never races through a sentence. Never tosses off an incomplete thought. In the years since his performance in Inventing the Abbotts induced rampant swooning, he has even begun to acquire a character actor's face: tiny grey flecks at his temples, mature lines at the corners of his eyes. And he's eerily still. Doesn't fidget. Rarely moves his hands when he speaks. He radiates gravity, intensity. Then again ...