For once, Robert Downey, Jr. isn't phoning in his performance from another planet. As Charlie Chaplin, he's finally all there.

Robert Downey Jr. appeared in a Jean Paul Gaultier fashion show at Los Angeles's Shrine Auditorium last September, somewhere between Dr. Ruth Westheimer, who walked the runway in a rubber nurse's uniform, and Madonna, who flashed her breasts to the screaming crowd. Downey was wearing a striped sailor's shirt, skinny black leggings and a morning coat that formed the train of the dress worn by the model flouncing beside him, his wife, Deborah Falconer. He shrugged off the morning coat, grabbed Falconer, kissed her passionately, pirouetted like a ballet dancer, took an exaggerated bow and headed back down the runway, wiggling his butt so hard it looked as if he were bouncing a beach ball from cheek to cheek. He was the center of attention, in his element. "Oooh, he just ruined his reputation!" someone in the crowd shouted. The fashion show, which was a benefit for the American Foundation for AIDS Research, segued into a Seventies disco filled with drag queens falling off their six-inch heels and gorgeous women in glorified underwear. It was one of the biggest, weirdest parties of the year - which in L.A. is really saying something. The old Downey would have dived into the abyss and stayed long into the next morning, especially after his success onstage.

That's Downey Reputation No. 1: callow, wild ne'er-do-well. Reputation No. 2 is infectious, hilarious natural talent. Both are partly true. Downey himself isn't yet sure which to believe. But the new Downey - or, at least, the current Downey - disappeared. His buddies, calling from their limo, finally found him. He was home. With his wife. Just the two of them. What this good behavior means, and how long it will last, remains to be seen.

Downey's pirouetting again, this time on a small soundstage in Hollywood, a high-ceilinged cell of a room lined with tan carpeting. On this Sunday aftemoon, he's come to loop dialogue for his new movie, Chaplin, a $40 million bio-pic due out on Christmas Day. Because Downey is afraid his English accent has dissolved in the months since the picture wrapped, he can't stand still. He's forever bumping into the stand that holds his script, rustling his oversized white shirt, driving the sound man berserk. But no one can stay mad at Downey. One look into his velvety brown eyes, one brush with his wriggling-puppy energy, and all is forgiven.

Sir Richard Attenborough, Chaplin's director, whose long list of credits includes the Oscar-gobbling Gandhi, tries to calm Downey with tales of a test-screening TriStar held recently. (No one at the studio compares Chaplin to Gandhi directly, but murmurs abound of Chaplin's potential to earn another slew of Oscars.) "Have they told you the ratings, R. D. ?" Attenborough asks. "The average test-rating for a leading man is 40 percent excellent to good. And this little sod got 84 percent." "What was wrong with the other 16 percent?," Downey says with mock indignation.

Finally, they settle down, Downey shifting from foot to foot in front of a microphone, Attenborough standing by his shoulder, working him word by word through a catalogue of emotional interpretations: "A little less sentimental there, darling, do you see?" The work goes well, until Downey gets stuck on the word 'romance'. After twelve takes, he hits it; Attenborough grabs his actor's ears and kisses him on the forehead. "How's the script you're writing, my poppet?" Attenborough asks him. "It's hard, but going really well," the poppet says. "It's good for me to be in one place and be creative in my head, as opposed to the shitty committee that's usually in there, going: Hide! Chaplin's coming out - hide!" He fakes a sob. "My fear of acceptance." He flops on the ground at Attenborough's feet and crosses his arms behind his head, like a patient on a psychiatrist's couch. "See, this was our working relationship," he says, then fake-cries some more. "I had another difficult period before my first birthday. . . ." Attenborough looks at Downey with equal parts affection and puzzlement. It's a response Downey's used to. One he cultivates, in fact.

But despite his clowning, Robert Downey, at 27, is well aware of what Chaplin could mean to him. Though he's worked nonstop for ten years and is the best thing about the movies he's made, including Less Than Zero, The Pick-up Artist, Air America and Soapdish, this is his first Classy Project: literary-minded director, sweeping historical drama, a host of impressive costars. What's more, he's playing Charlie Chaplin, film's premier comic actor, the man who forced the world to take him seriously, who insisted upon living his own life - complete with scandals and nervous breakdowns - as unconventionally as he wished.

Making Chaplin represents Downey's coming of age, not just as an actor but as a man.

Outside the soundstage, Sunday afternoon is fading away, and Downey's new wife is twiddling her thumbs in a hotel. They're in the middle of a romantic weekend to get reacquainted; they were just apart for two months while Falconer, a model, shot her first film in Germany. But Downey asks for additional takes more often than Attenborough does. He was fiercely determined to get this part, winning out over forty-odd other actors, and he will do it right. Chaplin was the culmination of an opportunity, and the biggest humiliation I've ever experienced," Downey says over lunch a few days later. "It was like winning the lottery, then going to prison. I realized that nothing that had worked for me before was going to work here. I'd watch one of Charlie's films, but by the end of it I was wildly depressed, because I realized that what he'd done in this twenty-minute short was more expressive and funnier than everything I've thought about doing my whole life." Over the course of filming, Downey changed his posture and the way he moved his mouth. He mastered two English accents, cockney and refined. He took tons of tennis lessons, then discovered Chaplin was a lefty. So he learned to play left-handed. "I suggest for anyone who isn't convinced to put on 'the Tramp' makeup and try to be funny," Downey says. "Do what Charlie did, or do your own thing. Just try it. And make sure you take your Stresstabs."

Attenborough never doubted Downey's ability. "When Robert is committed, the house could fall down, his favorite aunt could die, but it would be utterly irrelevant," he says. "Robert is identical to Charlie that way, his extraordinary search for what an artist believes to be perfection." Without knowing it, Attenborough has hit on Downey's shameful secret. He wants to be an artist. A real artist. If only he can figure out what that means. For one thing, it means not making schlock movies just for the money, something Downey admits to having done. His next role is a small one, a makeup artist on the make, in Robert Altman's new film, Short Cuts. And he's also writing that script, about a high-school reunion - "about someone deciding not to sleep through his life." He says it's not autobiographical. He's also exploring other options. He's quietly starting to record music, something he's always wanted to do. His version of Chaplin's theme song, "Smile" ("Smile, though your heart is breaking... if there are clouds in the sky, you'll get by, if you smile"), will be on the sound-track album, and he's working on about thirty original songs, whose titles are pinned to a corkboard in his living room. Downey and two pals, Josh Richman and Donovan Leitch, also made a documentary of the national political conventions last summer. The Last Party is Downey's story, the introduction of a formerly naive young man to politics. It's due in theaters in late January, after Inauguration Day.

But Downey's most sweepingly symbolic change is personal: He and Falconer, 25, got married in May, after dating for only six weeks. They'd known each other before; in fact, she'd briefly dated Josh Richman. But the speed of their courtship took everyone by surprise. After all, Downey and actress Sarah Jessica Parker (Honeymoon in Vegas) had broken up only a year before, after seven years together. Downey and Falconer didn't sneak out the bedroom window to elope, but they came pretty close. They drove up to Walnut Creek, in northern California, and got married in Falconer's mother's backyard. His closest friends, including Parker and Richman, were shocked (Richman learned about the wedding in the New York Post). Robert 'Public' Downey married in private, so soon? But he slipped into the role of husband as easily as sliding into a silk smoking jacket. "I'm gonna be 30 in a couple of years, and there's so much I want to do," he says. "Now I'm able to say: God, this person is great, really funny and smart a beautiful. This whole part of my life is taken care of."

A week later, in a smoky coffeehouse, he reconsiders that last statement. "What a bunch of malarkey," he says, laughing, agreeing it sounds pretty ingenuous. "But I've been thinking about it. Basically, I got married fast because I don't think many people ever get a chance in life to do what they want when they want. I took the opportunity to not be one of those guys who, three years later, goes [mock-crying]: God, I fucked up, she was the one, she had it all, and I was so selfish. I just want to drown the sniveler." So he's been a sniveler? "Please. Men are goats; we can't help it. Unless we really decide to, and then something changes in our eyes and things are just a little different forever. I address women differently now. Before, there was always some part of me that subconsciously was cruising them. Any member of the opposite sex that I met. So now I go out to lunch, I just order my food, and keep it above chin level."

Downey blames the Goat - that part of his own personality, and of all men's personalities, he says, that strays below the chin and over to the wilder side of life - for a large part of his breakup with Parker. They met when they were 18, on the set of the movie Firstborn. He was then a waiter-slash-bit player. "My friends and I were out of our minds, absolutely out of control, partying," he says. "In New York, 18 years old, thought we had it together 'cause we were making $1,250 a week. Completely on the road to destruction. I carried all my money around in my pocket. The idea of an accountant never occurred to me, not when there were all these $30 kimonos to buy, drinks at Baja and Cantina, gifts for fair-weather friends. The hand-to-mouth existence of my family was completely my way." Next thing they knew, Downey and his duffel bag had moved into Parker's Upper West Side apartment, near a sushi restaurant where the couple ate every day for three months. That's a lot of raw fish.

Eventually, they headed to L.A., where Downey zoomed around in a rented Merkur his friend Richman called the MeeKrob. "Everyone who knew us said this would never last; we were seemingly completely different personalities," Parker says today. "He was such an extrovert, while I was an introvert. He helped me a lot in going out, being courageous, not wanting to throw up all night. He was probably the most eccentric person I'd ever met, very mercurial and odd but also completely open, emotionally right there." She remembers great Christmases and Thanksgivings, when they cooked huge, festive dinners for friends. So what happened? Downey pauses for a long time. "I was dishonest with her a lot. I think after a certain point you break a trust with someone, and you can't repair it anymore. Also, she was growing and learning and really becoming a woman. I looked to her for security and at the same time didn't level with her about a lot of stuff." Broke trust how? "You name it," he says. Other women, too much partying. "Parker liked things like watching CNN and staying involved in events, having dinner parties with friends and reading novels. That was great for me, because I had a safe place. But I was into pulling 360's in the Universal parking lot and disappearing for three days for things one needs blood transfusions to recuperate from." Ah, the beginning of the Drug Conversation.

Though he's fallen off the wagon a few times, Downey says he's holding steady now. But there was no single turning point, no tidy story about the end of the line. "I'm a hard-way guy," he says." I've thought that my battles with my demons were over a million times, and they just weren't. But the idea of passing on something that might go back to f*cking Edwardian times in my family tree, of not stopping those patterns- no, no, we gotta rewrite that one. I don't want any excuses for failure anymore, except one: I tried my best and it didn't work. I want to live a little more in the future now, have a dialogue with a hopeful future self. As opposed to reacting to clove-smoking, Miller Lite-chugging, Douglas Park-throwing-up- in, 16-year-old girl-crazy high-school-dropout energy, which would be happy to talk to me still."

It's tempting to speculate where Downey's more dangerous energies spring from, easy to point the finger at, say, his unconventional upbringing. It was an eccenric, special childhood, but at times it was uncomfortable, Allyson says, choosing her words carefully. "Somewhere, Robert developed a sense of no self-esteem. He's always wanted to find the thing that would make him complete." The memories Downey chooses to recount are more charming than ominous. Robert senior proposed to Elsie on their third date, at a baseball game - "Hmm, I wonder if there's a pattern here?" Downey says. The couple moved to Greenwich Village, where Downey senior screened dailies in the living room, chatted on street comers with people like Abbie Hoffman and threw parties full of women who smelled like patchouli. "I would come out after I'd wet my bed and ask for foot rubs, and there would be incense and pot in the air," Downey junior says. He remembers fondly his fierce fights with Allyson: She locked him in a bureau; he tried to cut off her finger with a pair of scissors, and would unhook the hammock she was lying in. He remembers nightmares, too, with pirates coming in the window, and restless images of cement mixers and big wheels, machines in perpetual motion. The family spent a lot of time on the road: They moved to England, where Downey senior wrote Greaser's Palace - a film about Jesus's parachuting into the Midwest in the nineteenth century - then moved to New Mexico to shoot it. "We put Robert and Allyson in the movie because it was easier than hiring a babysitter. It kept them from getting bored, and we knew where they were," Downey senior says.

The Downeys then touched down in two artsy towns in Connecticut and, later, in Woodstock, New York. "This is probably a good metaphor for the general haphazardness of doing what we did," Downey says. "My father once ordered gravel to widen our driveway, but the guys in the truck brought the wrong size, rocks bigger than your fist. And Dad didn't care. He was, like: Ah, just put 'em down.' So driving up the driveway, you'd risk piercing the gas tank. I think about this now, and it drives me nuts. The idea of (a) some guy taking us for a ride, pulling a joke on this city hippie, and (b) my father just allowing it, saying yeah, making a long-term decision off the top of his head. "And I've done the same thing," Downey continues. "Deb and I have this gardener, and lately I've noticed that all he does is blow stuff from one corner to the other. I've been thinking, moving into that for-real, no-looking-back manhood stuff, that you have to be able to run your life." So he went outside, sent the guy home, phoned the landscaper. He felt good. Of course, two days later, the gardener with the blower was back. "I just hid," Downey says, laughing. "What am I gonna do? The real thing is, people are born into life and trailed by serious issues. A guy blowing a bunch of leaves around my backyard is not in the Top 4,000 greatest hits of what I need to focus on."

This flip-flopping is classic Robert Downey. In Woodstock, Downey spent a lot of time 'waiting for Dad to come home', and eventually witnessed that 'Search for Tomorrow' scene that represents the end of a marriage. "I realize now with Deb, you can't just have a home base with someone and expect things to work. You can't keep flying out of the nest and coming back with gifts and insight and humor and expect things to last." He and Allyson would sit in the Volvo in the driveway, playing the radio, mimicking their parents fights. Allyson says Robert was openly upset and remained angry at his father for years, until they started making movies together (Rented Lips, "Too Much Sun) in the late Eighties. "They were never competitive, exactly, although my brother fulfilled some dreams Dad may have had," she says. "Lots of families have one person excel beyond everyone's control. Robert was good at so many things, we were hard on him: 'This is good, but you can do better.' There was no unconditional confirmation."

Downey senior is obviously proud of his son; he tells stories of Robert's sitting down to play Thelonious Monk tunes on the piano at age 7 "And he never had a lesson. It's amazing to me how he did it. When he was a kid acting in Greaser's Palace, I remember I asked him to do a scene again, and he said 'No. You liked it the first time.' I had to chase him into the woods to get him back. He's great. If he wasn't my son, I'd probably think he was twice as great. But he knows how I feel about him." In LA. with his father, Downey acted in plays at Santa Monica High, but cut a lot more classes than he attended. Aside from the present, he calls it the greatest time of his life. "I went away one summer, and by the time I came back, Robert had converted my room into a love nest, a bachelor room," Allyson says. "He didn't tell his friends I was back; they'd come in, in the middle of the night and try to make out on top of me."

When Downey senior decided to move back to New York, he gave Robert an option: Get serious about going to school, or drop out and move with him. Downey practically sprinted to pack up his locker. Though he's not sorry he quit, he's thinking about getting his equivalency diploma. "I'm gonna allow myself to be the intellectual I am," he says archly. Before he met Parker, Downey lived in a series of glamorously sleazy New York apartments, perpetually surrounded by young women. "One time, he called me, all pathetic, 'Ally, I have pneumonia, bring me orange juice,'" Allyson says. "I get to his place, and there's about thirty girls rubbing his feet, feeding him through an eyedropper." Even ill at home, he was Making the Scene. He grins, remembering. "There was a time I could meet practically any woman, if her defenses were down, and have her throw down her purse to hold me. It's the 'vulnerable' thing."

But the irrepressible layabout was a pose, too. Downey worked as ferociously as he played. "He put in a couple of years in New York offending everybody to get known," Allyson says. He'd go to an audition for an all-black film, for example, and convince everyone in the waiting room that he had the part. So they'd leave. And there were no roles for whites in the movie. Still, Downey says he didn't take his work seriously: He wouldn't let himself feel like an artist. "I could phone my performance in, and it was still better than anyone else," he says. "But it felt like a scam, like shoplifting at Lord Taylor. Every film coming out was like snapping another sensor off a sweater, draping it around my waist and chatting with the security guard as I walked out." Though he made money and got the attention he craved, it was never fulfilling."

You see the end product shining in the distance, and see it do a barrel roll into the cement about twenty yards short. And you go: Oh, not again.'" That was all B.C. - before Chaplin. Something's changed in Downey's eyes. In the course of shooting his political documentary, he found himself back on his high-school stage. "I realized, You know what, man? You fucking did it. You pulled away from all the odds against you and made a life and a career for yourself. I really got a great sense of accomplishment standing there. From Will Parker in Oklahoma! to Chaplin in twelve years is great." He falls silent for a second. "A lot of things came out of the clouds for me in the last year," he finally says, his deep voice deepening. "For the first time, I am at a place where I demand respect. People used to perceive me as some kind of fucking idiot savant who needs to be led around by the hand. Which took the edge offbeing a grown-up, whether or not I wanted to admit it. But you know what? I'm an artist. I know I am. I'm excited about this opportunity to be selfish at all costs. I don't mean thoughtless. I mean self-centered, centered within myself. Fuck 'em if they don't like it. You either get your shit together and keep it that way, or you keep flailing around, wishing things would change. I'm out of that mode now."

Sunday afternoon at the Downey-Falconer house, in a new mode. The place, halfway up one of the Hollywood hills, feels like a real home: wicker furniture, wood floors painted strong reds and greens, four cats prowling around, a bright-red grand piano in the corner. One room, the Eggplant Room, done in deep purple, is furnished with pillowy, lounge-type furniture, perfect for hanging out with friends. Falconer glides about, unpacking and rearranging, supervising the transformation from bachelor pad (Downey has lived here for six years) to something more couple-friendly. Chaplin is said to have owned the house; he bought it for a girifriend. Now it's bursting with Chaplin memorabilia, including Downey's film wardrobe. "I asked Attenborough for it in a weak moment, at the end of a long day, and he said yes!" Downey says, exultant. "Debbie's my size; she's already claimed some of the best stuff." Dozens of period suits, shirts and waistcoats are spread over the dining-room table, including a copy of the mock-Hitler uniform from The Great Dictator.

He watches with something like wonder as she moves little piles of things from room to room. "This week was the first in my life that I've stayed home every night," he says. In twenty-seven years, the first week? "People have been calling, old energies: 'We're all up at the house, we're gonna go... No. No. It's like the museum where you see Early Man, and his head's all frozen, and we say: That was us.'" Both unhappy when they met, Downey and Falconer went straight together. As Downey recently joked to Richman, "I got to know her through a rigid course of shock therapy." If this marriage is another safety net, it's one both of them need. "I think there are certain dynamics in a relationship that can only happen if two people are more alike in certain areas," Downey says. "Not that Parker wasn't; it's just that there are certain things that, unless you're there, you can never understand about someone else. I look at Debbie, and I just feel I'm looking in a mirror. She gives me one of those looks over coffee, those James Woods, 'What, are you kidding me, baby?' looks. So there's more unity in an ironic way." He jumps up suddenly. "I have to pause. That energy's in the air. I have to go give Debbie a large hug."

He disappears. In a few minutes, Downey and Falconer wander back into the living room, looking like twins with a private joke. "My wife glances out the window the other day, and there I am, digging a hole in the backyard, a grave, and I'm putting my clothes from Less Than Zero in it and patting down the dirt," he says. "The next day I was, like: F*ck, why did I do that?' But four days later, I felt something drift away. (The burial) represents acknowledging how a lack of self-nurturing leads to gruesome results. It's one thing to see the train coming, and another to get out of the way." He turns to Falconer. "What did you think when you saw your husband digging up the backyard?" "You know," she says. "I came out and brought you a sandwich and went back in." "That's right!" Downey beams. "I was, like, Yeah, she's the one. She's the right one.'"

More and more often these days, Downey floats over to his spiritual side. He reads books by everyone from Jung to Robert Biy to Stephen Hawking, with titles like 'Men Are From Mars,' Women Are From Venus' and 'Way of the Peaceful Warrior.' He watches Joseph Campbell videos that discuss 'the divine beauty of the superfluous nature'. Downey loves that line. It's his nature, after all. "How about this?" he says, grinning. "Shirley MacLaine. I'm nuts about her." She visited him on the Chaplin set; she was the first guest to arrive at his last birthday party. They can talk for hours. "This sounds stupid," he says, "but I feel... not like she's handing me a baton, but that we have similarities in our destinies."

He's also an avid reader of the Seth books, psycho-spiritual tomes dictated to a woman named Jane Roberts by 'an energy essence personality no longer focused in physical reality'. Downey has believed in Seth's principles-mainly, that we createour own reality-since he was 15. "It's funny I'm talking about this, because you can really bury yourself with this kind of talk, the upward mobility of consciousness," he says. "I'm still skeptical, but it rang true for me. It's my psyche's version of the safe place, giving myself information and experience of something greater than just life and its hell-like nature." But even in this new mode, Downey has doubts to contend with. "This year, this movie, it's so important to me," Downey says. "That I break whatever fucking notions there have been about me, that I stop this kind of happy-go-lucky attitude and really start capitalizing on what I can get out of life."

Suddenly, he bursts out laughing. "And I'm fucking miserable about it. I'm just so tired of my head." But why? Where did that come from? He sounded so positive. "Because there's still some part of me that really would like to just be a simpleton," he says. "Just let Debbie go out and make movies and be her assistant, and know that if the phone was ringing, it wasn't for me. It would hurt for the first year, then it would be over."

It's not uncommon for an artist, on the verge of success, to want to hide. Chaplin hid in Switzerland for years. But how can you hide from your own mind? Downey knows a true artist can't. "This other part of me feels like there's been voices calling to me for a long time," he continues. "Most of them are creative, real quiet things. But if you listen to those voices, you also have to listen to the ones who whisper homicidal scenarios while you're in the shower. It's all the same voice." Before, if the demons called Downey, he would jump up and go. But what if they call now, after he's taken responsibility for himself, after he's finally discovered a life he doesn't want to claw his way out of? Can Robert Downey stay open to his artistic voices yet remain safe? It's uncharted territory. As he says, "I'm not used to feeling like I belong where I am."