After a life spent trying to outrun the demons of drug addiction, Robert Downey Jr. is channeling his energy toward a slate of new films, including the comedy thriller Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. He's on track. Can he go the distance?

"It's sick how good I look at my age," he says with a smile. "I look at some of my peers who maybe didn't throw down as many hard-ass rubber-to-the-road miles as I did, and I look fantastic!"

Robert Downey Jr. is lucky. It may sound odd, since we're talking about a guy whose every misstep was chronicled in the press back in the late '90s. But it's true. As true as the fact that he's sitting here right now. Which, in itself, is a testament to his dumb luck. Because after all of the hazy, half-remembered coke-filled nights, Robert Downey Jr. should be dead. He knows it every time he looks in the mirror and sees the fantastic-looking irony of it all staring back at him. The baddest bad boy of them all is 40 years old now, and he doesn't have a scratch on his body. It's remarkable. There are some grooves that bracket his mouth when he smiles that mischievous smile. But really, with everything he's been through, his face should look as beat-up as the Acropolis by now.

Sitting at a trendy poolside hotel bar in downtown Los Angeles, Downey is 20 years older than everyone in the place. And yet, he looks so good, so healthy, that he could probably stop the interview right now and start leading a yoga class, just as long as he eighty-sixed the unfiltered Camel dangling from his mouth. Aside from the cigarettes, his only remaining vice, Downey keeps his racing mind distracted these days with meditation, therapy, 12-step programs, exercise, and work. Lots and lots of work. He's in two movies this year, including George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. And he'll be in seven next year, working with some of Hollywood's most prominent directors - Richard Linklater, Curtis Hanson, and David Fincher.

Acting has become like a drug for him. The thing he once took for granted and almost pissed away, he now needs more than he's ever needed it before. Because Downey wants to make good on the promise that's always flickered underneath the madness: that he could be his generation's greatest actor if he just stopped acting like its most screwed-up one.

"I've probably taken better care of myself in the last 700 days than I ever have before," he says. "I feel like because I've finally gotten out of my own way, I can enjoy my reputation. Because for all intents and purposes, what I should be right now is this never-do-well, embittered, unemployable guy arguing with some hooker outside a Malibu hotel scrambling for a syringe. But I've got it really good. I've got a great gal, my kid's good, and I really love this movie."

The great gal is Susan Levin, a movie producer whom he married this summer. The kid is his 12-year-old son, Indio (by his first wife, Deborah Falconer). And the movie is Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang - a twisty noir comedy in which dumb luck plays a key part. Downey stars as a hapless New York thief named Harry Lockhart who evades the police by hiding out in an acting audition, stumbles into landing a part in a movie, and is sent out to Hollywood, where he gets into even more trouble.

"He's a New York thug who comes to L.A., almost gets his ass killed, and winds up being essentially a very happy West Coast guy with some promise for the future by the end of the movie," says Downey. "It's the story of my life."

"What do you mean you don't want to go swimming?" Robert Downey Jr.'s son, is sticking his toes in the hotel's pool, testing the temperature of the water. Ten feet away in the midst of an interview, his father is egging him on, trying to persuade him to go in. Indio has just finished guitar lesson downtown and has joined his father at the hotel, where the two of them will spend the night as a little mini-vacation after a day of promotion and photo shoots. Downey had to charge the room on his assistant's credit card because his has "a severely curtailed limit." "So, are you going in or what?" Indio shrugs his shoulders. "Is it warm? Hot? Tepid?" "Luke...," says the boy. "Look at that vocab! Luke. Luke! I am your father, Luke!" Bored by his father's attempts to bully him into the pool, Indio heads up to their suite to watch TV.

After he leaves, I ask Downey if his son knows about everything his dad has been through. "Well, I would say he's wise beyond his years, but not because his eyes ever saw anything he shouldn't witness. He's got a pretty stable upbringing because of his mom. And as often as not, I was there. It's not like I was always off on some perpetual run."

In 1999, Downey was sent to prison for a year. Once paroled, he was arrested two more times within a year and sent to another court-ordered treatment facility. How does this happen? How does an actor, within a few years of being' nominated for an Academy Award as Chaplin, wind up chasing a death wish?

Downey says the drugs have always been there. After his parents split up in his early teens, and things were "sad and f---ed-up and hopeless," he remembers riding around on his bike in New York City smoking pot. "Not to get all Michael Jackson on you, but I didn't really have a childhood. So I just kind of fit it in between 28 and 37," he says. "Then it just got bigger and bigger. There were just other varieties of self-medication being the answer to everyday problems, situations, and realities."

By 1995, the self-medication took a turn for the worse. "All my buddies said they were smoking opium, but it was actually black-tar heroin," he says. "And then we were all doing coke. And some of those guys are okay now, and some of those guys who aren't okay now and never will be started shooting up. And I was like, 'I don't think I'm going to go there.' But then I also said I'd never smoke coke, and I did that. That was awful. It makes you psychotic."

Downey says his drug use was never an issue on a movie set. He insists he always knew the difference between when it was time to work and time to play. Well, except for one film: 1997's Hugo Pool.

"It was one of my dad's films," he says. "Out of respect for him, he was trying to help me out and I was just in a bad place. But it's a cult favorite among some of my peers because I was, like, 138 pounds and it was beyond improvisation. It's like, 'Wow, he's literally bouncing this performance off some space shuttle far away!' Which, to tell you the truth, is just another one of my special skills: fencing, archery, and acting in a blackout." Downey starts cracking up.

It's strange. Even when he was killing himself, Downey never lost the support of his friends in the business. His biggest champion was Mel Gibson, his costar in 1990's Air America. "Mel has had his own bouts with alcohol abuse in his life," says Kiss Kiss producer Joel Silver, who says Gibson called him to vouch for Downey. Gibson told the producer that Downey had just shot The Singing Detective, a movie Gibson produced, and had done so without any problem. And he urged Silver to consider him for the producer's next film, Gothika.

When I ask Downey why he thinks people like Gibson want to help him so much, he seems confounded. "I can't figure it out," he says. "I think you can tell inherently that some people are greasy, mean, self-centered, and have no intention of doing the right thing. But maybe people sense that my heart's in the right place."

Downey says his recovery is going as well as can be hoped for these days. "I know so many people who say, 'I'm gonna have to not do this,' even though it's the only thing that ever gave them a sense of God's grace," he says. "But I have no euphoric recall or desire... It's been lifted." Downey has such a straight face when he says this that if he's lying he's a far better actor than even his biggest fans think.

Watching Downey work, it's easy to see that be could be either a director's dream actor or his worst nightmare. On the set of Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang in the spring of 2004, Downey's pinball mind seems to crank so fast that no single line reading is the same as the next. He's so quick on his feet, freestyling and improvising, that sometimes it throws his costars off. But here's the thing, each take he does - no matter how far off the script-is better than the previous one. The scene he's shooting on this day requires him to cry. He does six or seven takes, and each time the tears come as regularly as Old Faithful.

"I think Robert can do anything as an actor," says his Kiss Kiss costar Val Kilmer. "I'm kind of a snob for intelligent actors, and man, he's fast. He's one of the best going in my age group, and he hasn't even gotten started because all of the energy that was going into his own personal hell, all of that energy can now go into his work."

One thing people mention over and over again when they talk about Downey is how fast his mind works. You can see it on screen in a movie like Natural Born Killers or Two Girls and a Guy. But the best evidence of that quickness is the way he talks. In conversation, Downey speaks in a series of unwieldy metaphors. It's a sign of a racing mind and also an impulse to see if he can extricate himself from a seemingly inescapable setup. For instance, he'll start a thought by saying "Okay, let's say you're a polar bear at Sea World," or "Let's say you're a rat in a Plexiglas tank full of water..." and then go off in a million different directions, and then just as you think his grammatical gymnastic routine is going to collapse, he'll somehow manage to circle around, save it, and stick the landing.

Here he is talking about acting:

"Okay, let's say you're a pitcher for the Astros. You know what you need to do to warm up your arm, and you know what it is that helps you throw the ball fast. Now, if some director says, 'I love you and I can't wait to shoot this movie with you,' and then they tie your cleat laces together and say, 'Now do that thing that you do,' I can't. I can't express myself. And I'm not pitching fast and everyone's watching."

Another Downey metaphor - one in which he evokes Charles II comes up when I ask him to compare himself with the actors in his age group who are often referred to as "the best actors of their generation." Guys like Sean Penn and Johnny Depp. Guys who ditched the bad-boy act earlier than Downey did and have been reaping all of the leading-man roles and the kudos in the meantime.

"One of the really satisfying things about Kiss Kiss was being the lead," he says. "I was like, 'It's good to be the king!' I'm like Charles II returning. 'What the f---'s been happening here? Who the f--- is Cromwell? Get him out of here!'"

Downey is only half kidding. He doesn't mean any disrespect. He says he's been watching the work of his peers and been inspired by it. Still, he's hungry to put them al1 on notice.

"Of course, I'd like to think that on my best day, they should all take a powder," he says with a chuck1e. "All the good guys are really good. Everybody is about as good as everybody else, and it's just a matter of in those movies, in those scenes, and on those days, who's able to be the most at peace and al1ow themselves to shine."

Downey slurps the last of his iced tea, lights another unfiltered Camel with a showbiz flourish, then adds, "But on that level playing field, when I get on a roll, I'm probably more fearless than any motherf***er who's ever walked the plank."