Man to Watch, Robert Downey Jr. in Los Angeles last December. Gucci suite, Grooming. Natalia Bruschi for Matrix/The Wall Group; set design, Bill Doig. Sittings Editor: Phyllis Posnick

After dark years of addiction, rehab and prison, Robert Downey jr. steps back into the light with a new marriage, seven new films, and a whole new attitude.

We are in a culture of salvation: where all crimes are annulled by confession and apology, and narcotic substances are washed away by spells of rehab. Robert Downey, Jr., as famous for the abuse of drugs as he is for the use of his talent, spent the years between 1995 and 2001 in and out of rehab and prison, but he's a reluctant penitent on the confessional circuit. He doesn't subscribe to the self-congratulatory confessional mode of the recently saved, who most often emerge eager to feed the voyeurism of the waiting choir and maybe make a few converts along the way. Downey throws off a bright cloud of metaphors instead, to stun, blind, and perhaps derail the watcher.

When he went on The Oprah Winfrey Show eighteen months ago with his fiancée, Susan Levin, Oprah greeted him with "You cleaned up. You cleaned up well.... I think that your story is so remarkable and that somebody might be saved by hearing you." She played the footage of Downey telling a judge, "I have a shotgun in my mouth and I've got my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gunmetal." He confirmed that his father had given him pot when he was seven "or eight or nine" and that at home, marijuana "was a staple, like rice." "Like rice," repeated Oprah, adding, in a dieter reflex, "Carbs." Her subsequent questions - when did he start smoking crack cocaine? what is black-tar heroin? - culminated when she asked if he remembered driving around naked in a Porsche throwing imaginary rats out the window. "They were real to me," Downey shot back.

I met him in Washington, D.C., last fall, and when we touched on his addictions, he said, "If I was so satisfied with it before I blew off its ankle with a howitzer, why am I suddenly going to give a shit now because you are telling that what I already know to be true will work?" I was pretty sure he wasn't really addressing me, more improvising an answer to a hypothetical person who'd encouraged him to clean up his act.

This piece is not going to be like the interview in the Australian Courier Mail last fall, which was headlined DOWNEY FINDS A NEW HIGH and read in part, "Looking back, with a fair bit of therapy and about a year in prison under his belt, he manages to make sense of the lost opportunities." Nor is it going in the direction of the Orange Country Register, same period, which quoted Downey on the subject of his "demons": "As a rule, I don't like to talk about it, but if I'm really tired or really bored or we can't get on to a more interesting subject, I'll talk about it."

Washington, D.C.'s, Georgetown was a solid kind of place to meet him. A sign on the brick Episcopal Church outside the hotel declared, WE'RE HERE FOR YOU. Mountain clothes were displayed in the windows of tiny redbrick stores. The sidewalks were made of bricks lying on their sides, and a huge wall of yet more bricks dominated the lobby of the hotel, which looked, Downey said, "as if George Bush had designed the Mercer."

He was in town with Susan Levin, now his wife, a producer for Joel Silver, on location for her own film, The Visiting. They met on the set of Gothika in Montreal three years ago, and married last summer in Amagansett. He worked the words "Mrs. Downey" and "the Missus" into the conversation at every opportunity. A platinum ring on his finger was set with tiny diamonds along the edges. Mrs. Downey was in a yoga class. He would have been, too, if I hadn't been there. The lone paparazzo huddled outside in an SUV may have been stalking the stars of Mrs. Downey's film, Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman, or just waiting for Downey to make some large public mistake.

"When I walk into the hotel," said Downey, "people still don't know whether to help me make a Shiatsu appointment or wrestle me to the ground."

He was on a brief hiatus from starring in David Fincher's Zodiac as Paul Avery, a seventies San Francisco hipster journalist obsessed with the Zodiac Killer. His long hair and the black goatee flecked with silver belonged to the character. Only the arched eyebrows and round black eyes were unquestionably those of Robert Downey, Jr., but to step outside, he hid them under a cap with a KISS KISS BANG BANG logo. A pair of narrow glasses skewed the familiar proportions of his features into those of someone you could almost place, a British director perhaps, or a distant relative of Willem Dafoe.

You wouldn't know who he was, but you could guess. The restaurant owner figured it out and comped us our grilled fish, his Coca-Cola with lime, my tea. No alcohol, of course, but also no lemon: He recently found out through a doctor called Renna that he is allergic to a weird grouping of mushrooms, tomatoes, lemons, and mint. "All the stuff that I thought I needed to not eat to not gain weight, like bread, is fine. I just know that since I've been on this diet I've been losing weight, but I'm not not eating."

Robert Downey, Jr.'s, recovery began in what he calls "a window of opportunity" on Independence Day 2002. "The country's independence, my independence; that generated enough connection and camaraderie with a bunch of people who said, 'It really only takes a little while before you're on this side, helping the next guy'; pretty soon it's Presidents' Day."

Michael Hoffman, a longtime friend who has directed him in three films, describes Downey as extraordinarily intuitive: "He has such a level of sensitivity and awareness when he is straight that he had a hard time coping with it - angels, devils - perhaps he medicated himself to desensitize himself. I think he's now working to come to understand himself as mortal and vulnerable, and that's a very different posture, and not always pleasant."

"There's so much purpose to be found, and it's all just coming clear to me," Downey says, and falls into a small trance as he describes a Zen deck of cards: "One card is called 'Fighting,' and it's this samurai - he's really encumbered head to toe in armor, even his fingers and his eyes; there's no chink, nothing is getting through. The message is that until you stop fighting, you can't realize that your wounds are not threatening you from the outside, but inside. And there's another card that's a beekeeper, in kind of sheer chiffon, in an autumnal setting with trees and leaves. And it says, 'The beekeeper has become comfortable and rooted in the mundane.' Because of how much effort and time goes into choosing the maple syrup."

What maple syrup? Where, maple syrup? Oh, yes, the autumnal setting. He can see the card; he can see the trees that he's talking about and their yellowing leaves. I can't. I'm stuck on the maple syrup.

There is an ashtray on the table. He quickly lights up, apologizes to me for still smoking unfiltered Camels, as if I were the health police. "I'm embracing my inner grandma," he declares over his soup; she's a character who recurs in his interviews, his all-purpose cautious-old-lady metaphor who sometimes needs a shawl. By the time the main course arrives, he is sighing: "It'll be years and years and years before I look forward to my birthday again."

"How to manage my incessant desire to alter my consciousness? I do the same five or six things every day; then I inject a bit of novelty so I don't go insane. Morning business, in-box, out-box, check in with extended family or family of fellow travelers. It's no longer 'What are we going to do about me?' It's nice to get out of the realm of 'I am a train wreck' and just materially, respectfully, efficiently deal with the maintenance."

His disciplines are exercise, Pilates, yoga, meditation, and the practice of Wing Chun, a lethal form of martial arts developed centuries ago by a woman priest. He has presented his teacher, or "sifu," Eric Oram, to the Oprah show, and journalists have watched demonstrations of moves and standing meditations. Downey declared to Oprah that the primary purpose of Wing Chun "is to promote a sense of spiritual warriordom." On Oprah he also lit a bundle of dried sage and purified not only the set and the band but also members of the audience with the smoke, in an ancient Native American ritual known as smudging. It's little wonder that he'd rather not delve once more into the subject of his healing rituals with me.

"Any momentum I have on this new track is referred to in terms of what's happening to my career," he says and goes into an alien voice: " 'You've got tons of stuff coming out; what are you lensing now?'" Back to his own voice for "I want to sayt that's what I'm doing with the days that I'm on display, but this new track is an engaging and fascinating deal. Part of the fascination of it is that it is sometimes just really hard. Kind of like building the airplane while you're flying it."

Downey has seven movies coming out. The parts he plays are all leads, only one a cameo, in Curtis Hanson's Lucky You. He's an acerbic theater critic opposite Michael Keaton in Hoffman's Game 6, a conspiracy theorist in Richard Linklater' s A Scanner Darkly, a lawyer in Brian Robbins's The Shaggy Dog, the journalist in Pincher's Zodiac. In November he will be seen starring opposite Nicole Kidman in Fur, a fictional moment in the life of Diane Arbus, directed by Steven Shainberg. He also stars in and produced A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, which was well received at Sundance. It's by his old friend Dito Montiel - "The guy most likely to strip down to nothing but his combat boots and run screaming down West Broadway," he says proudly, which tells you something about where his heart lies.

Downey became a star at 21 in 1987 in Less than Zero, as the crack-addicted Julian Wells. "I was playing someone who drove a $60,000 Avanti to school every morning and was strung out on crack. I wasn't from L.A.; I had never saved enough money to even rent a car; I had never even seen anyone smoke crack. People are like, 'It must have been a trip for you, having been a spoiled little rich kid on crack, to play one.' " Infact, he's a bohemian child of wildly eccentric parents, his mother an actress and his father a famously maverick director whose work ranges from the anarchic 1969 comedy Putney Swope to the strange 1997 Hugo Pool, in which Downey Jr., playing a wacko European director, could not, for once, keep his accents or his performance in line.

Downey and his sister, Allyson, were children on New York's University Place. They briefly lived in L.A. when his father went out to write a script "and forgot to leave for fifteen years." Life with father consisted of going to Miller's Outpost for jeans, and "dropping by Paramount to see Jack." Downey claims the only dramatic training he ever received was during his short time at Santa Monica High School, when Martin Sheen's son Ramon Estevez cast him in Oklahoma!

"I didn't get trained in drama school; it was all on the job. That shit costs money; my dad was an underground filmmaker. I was faking it, to try to fit in with the kids who really were Professional Children's School or Performing Arts. If you look at what was going on in 1983 in Manhattan for kids, by the time you were fourteen you'd wept to Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris; you'd done a Jules Feiffer one-act; you'd seen West Side Story done as well as it would ever be. We all went up for everything from Casio commercials to Once upon a Time in America. We were kind of learning how to be in music videos, all dancing about and singing. This is nothing like the training that Cary Grant had in vaudeville, or Chaplin, rehearsing all the time with Karno."

He and his sister lived in an apartment their father provided on Eighty-fourth and West End Avenue, with a bed, a couch, a bowl, two spoons, and two posters taped to the windows. The posters kept coming down, and Downey kept taping them up. He got work at Area, in one of the nightclub's dioramas of live people behind glass windows, as "the conveyor-belt operator in a space-themed installation, sending Gumby dolls in plastic bubbles to an undisclosed location for $10 an hour and all the brandy I could muster."

When he was seventeen, the choreographer and director Pat Hirch "changed my life." She cast him in a play called American Passion. Early on he knew how much he needed silence and meditation before he went on stage: "If I didn't get there an hour and a half before curtain, I wasn't going to be ready. The other people would roll in at half-hour, and I'd be stretching out or doing some fake yoga, and they'd say, 'Robert's going to Nirvana before the show.' But I was the only one who got an agent two weeks later."

His fist starring role was as the title characterin James Toback's The Pick-Up Artist. He was 21, sweet and unformed and faintly chubby, and devastatingly good. Toback says, "He's a natural entertainer to a degree that no one else is," and went on to cast him as the two-timing actor in Two Girls and a Guy.

Downey was 23 and living in Los Angeles with Sarah Jessica Parker and four Persian cats when Michael Hoffman put him in Soapdish. Four years later they did Restoration together, and this year it's Game 6.

When Downey was starring as Charlie Chaplin in Richard Attenborough's 1992 Chaplin, the film's composer, John Harry, took me aside at London's San Lorenzo restaurant to tell me that he was watching "a genius at work, one of the greats." During breaks in the filming, Downey drove up to the Montecito hotel in Santa Barbara, which Chaplin had owned with Fatty Arbuckle. "I'd go to the thrift shop and get torn-up clothes, walk down the streets with a mask on, and interact with people. David Robinson had just written a definitive biography of Chaplin, and I was so crazy by the end of six and a half months of research that I told Richard Attenborough we needed to rewrite the script because there were too many things that were factually incorrect. They were saying, 'He's going off the deep end.'"

In the finished film, Downey is comic and tragic at once, fluid and graceful in the pratfalls and the famous routines without being pastiche. It's a brilliant performance, and the most layered and sincere one he had turned in to date: "Half the scenes, Attenborough would be by the lens," he explains, "looking at me, crying with me. You're doing the scene together; you are playing the director's take on the scene. It's a big Mom-and-Dad projection on the director. The relationship between the actor and the director becomes a third thing, and that's the character." Chaplin's daughter Geraldine played his mother in the film and said in a TV interview, "I think Daddy took a trip down here and got inside him." He was nominated for an Oscar that he should have won.

After Chaplin, Downey married Deborah Falconer, a singer, and bought a house in Malibu. "It was my most together moment; we had the kid, got the big house and a couple of extra cars, and I said, 'Well, now what?' Take some time off, do some art movies - Restoration, Richard III. I completely self-destructed financially with the art-house movies, doing these jobs that barely covered three months of f***ing dry-cleaning expenses. And the partying.... You'd have thought that at some point I'd sit down and say, 'OK, I just got nominated for Chaplin, what I do in the next eighteen months is really key, so maybe I should cut my bong intake in half and focus on what my plan is.'"

This is not what he did. There was a divorce; there were the drugs and the arrests and the rest. But he never stopped working, and took roles in all sizes and shapes, from the male lead in Ally McBeal to small parts in terrible films. Everything.

"The mandatory ingredient in any creative endeavor is humility," Downey says, "and if you don't create the situations where you can embrace humility further and further, life will find a way to do it for you. So I like to take the lead in the humility department. I suppose I am still barely ambitious enough to survive."

Michael Hoffman observes, "I don't know how much protection ambition affords an actor. Robert has a talent that peers and audiences recognize as something rare and exceptional. Robert is a character actor - he's a trickster, a truth teller, and that's not the job of a leading man. We all know we need someone brave enough to go to the dark places."

Amy Robinson, the producer who gave him an early break in Baby It's You, in 1982, understands the essentially lunatic aspect of talent itself. "Really talented people," she observes, "never really go away; they wax and they wane."