http://nymag.com/arts/cultureawards/2010/69909/New York Magazine 's Year End Wrap-Up
The Brainy Bunch
James Franco, Joseph Gordon-Levitt,
Tom Hardy, Jesse Eisenberg,
and Michael Fassbender.
By Mary Kaye Schilling
Published Dec 5, 2010 
There are no neat antecedents for the five men on this page. Like
Ryan Gosling, none is a traditional leading man, action figure, or romantic-comedy arm candy. They are all too intense, too weird, too complicated. None is bankable. Do they think about their image at all? If so, it’s not central to who they are—acting might not be either: Polymaths Gosling and
James Franco could well consider it a sideline.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is possibly more interested in collaborating with other artists on
hitRECord, his online production company.
Jesse Eisenberg—arguably the first egghead movie star—hosts Olympic-class wordplay on his website
OneUpMe.com.
They are never predictable and often unlikable; their good guys are flawed, and when they’re bad, they’re horrid:
Tom Hardy delivered the most aggressively strange badass in recent memory in
Nicolas Winding Refn’s
Bronson, then played
Heathcliff. Hardy is known for his ballsy range, but that could be said of any of them: Fassbender will play the young
Magneto in the next
X-Men,
Rochester in a new
Jane Eyre, and
Carl Jung for
David Cronenberg. Eisenberg—who cut his teeth playing sympathetic motormouths in comedies like
Zombieland —was clearly yearning to bite into a role as juicily cerebral as
Mark Zuckerberg,
The Social Network ’s ultimate asshole. In
(500) Days of Summer, Joseph Gordon-Levitt made the romantic-lead-who-never-gets-the-girl more appealing than the guys who do; he followed that with
Hesher ’s singularly unpleasant sociopath. Franco, in one year, captured the devilish brilliance of
Allen Ginsberg in
Howl and the rash bravado of
Aron Ralston in
127 Hours.
Finding an actor with the charisma to spin a hit out of 90 minutes of a man and a boulder would have been tough even five years ago. But you can imagine all these actors doing something interesting with the role of Ralston (even if that involved Eisenberg talking his arm off). It would be hard to beat Franco’s performance, but that’s not the point. It’s that finally, there is a deepening pool of leading men who thrive on complexity. Even in a big studio film, these actors bring the raw nerve of the indie sensibility, and in so doing, they are reimagining the mainstream.
Also posted in Culture Tent/Danny Boyle's latest, a fact-based '127 Hours,' with James Franco and—Kate Mara! http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,46197.msg596344/topicseen.html#msg596344
