On the night before Robert Downey Jr. met the press at the festival, he was treated to an extraordinary standing ovation at the conclusion of The Singing Detective, the feature-film version of Dennis Potter's celebrated British miniseries.

In the movie, produced by Mel Gibson and directed by Keith Gordon from a script Potter had always hoped would be set and produced in the United States, Downey takes the role previously made famous by the formidable Michael Gambon: a detestably ill-tempered pulp writer hospitalized with the same excruciating skin condition that Potter himself suffered from.

It's a fearlessly unsympathetic performance in a risk-ridden project, and therefore precisely the kind of thing you'd expect the passionately unconventional 38-year-old actor - an Oscar nominee (for 1992's Chaplin), son of the maverick moviemaker Robert Downey and infamous repeat offender of narcotics violations - to be drawn to.

And, if the previous night's response says anything, the gamble paid off: When Downey took the stage following the screening, the crowd stood and raised the roof.

Sitting poolside on the deck at the Four Seasons, a buff and healthy looking Downey is still visibly overwhelmed by the response. "God it was such a good feeling," he says. "And I got to be there and watch it and ride it."

For the actor, whose form-fitting Nike tank top is showing off his muscles and a fresh-looking tattoo of his 10-year-old son's name - "Indio" - the ovation was a rousing public confirmation that it was time to move on. After a decade of court appearances and unforgiving media scrutiny, the Toronto audience was welcoming Robert Downey Jr. back. "I felt like I grew 2 inches last night," he says beaming.

Downey is surprisingly game when it comes not only to meeting the press, but also to talking about his tabloid notoriety. When asked if he hesitated about subjecting himself to questions here for two days, he shrugs.

"I've come up against men and women who had a job to do and all I had to do was show up with a bunch of garbage," he says. "And they're not allowed to say, 'Nothing stinks?' It's like saying a woman subjected herself to an abusive relationship for 25 years," he says. "No. She subjected herself for one minute and volunteered for 25 years. And I was that abused woman. What I did was I was subjugated for a heartbeat and I signed up for a lifetime."

"If someone wants to get indignant on my behalf, they should get indignant that a man can go from a kid to a boy to a man to a boy to a kid over and over again and imagine he's not going to incur God's wrath somehow." You've got choices, insists Downey, and he made his own. They just happened to be choices that sucked. "I believe that within a rather loosely pre-arranged destiny, you've got a lot of leeway."

When asked what it was that allowed him to summon the reserves of percolating rage that defines his character in The Singing Detective, he offers: "How about 28 years of bad luck?"

While prone to occasional bursts of vivid Downeyspeak - "Obligation is the mother of deformity," he insists at one point, adding later that "I'm in this stratosphere of objectivity right now and it's a really Zen experience" - there's no escaping the fact that the man who once qualified as the poster boy for out-of-control, pharmaceutically fuelled Hollywood excess now seems like someone who has finally reached the other shore.

The aquatic metaphor is his: "Here we are by the pool," he says, leaning back and draping his gym-toned arms across the back of the bench. "How do guys ever arrive at the other side of their oceans? Just pick up your paddle and row like a madman."

Does he worry about being drawn back out to sea again? He leans forward conspiratorially and fixes his eyes on yours. "You know what my friend Warren says? Warren B. I won't say his last name. Warren B. says, 'Kid, can you smell the cell? You'll be all right.'"

Robert Downey Jr. can still hear the applause from the night before, and he can still hear the roar of the ocean that it took him almost a decade to cross. But make no mistake: He can still smell the cell.