Penn

Ten years ago, he was done with acting. Ten years ago, he was done with politics, too. Now he acts with abandon and is the most vilified political figure in Hollywood since Hanoi Jane. Sean Penn has aged pretty good.

By Scott Raab

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Sean Penn

The screening room on the Sony lot in Culver City is much larger than the crowd, maybe a couple dozen industry types, gabbing behind me, waiting for the movie to unreel. I'm down in front, hissing into my cell, getting one last update from the wife back in New Jersey on game four of the Cavs-Pistons series. Sean Penn has yet to show.

The Cavs, God love 'em, get the W despite my wife's lousy play-by-play, just as the yakking in the room goes hush. I crane my neck to see that the auteur is in the house, looking like a Little Rascal gone to seed. No shave, red eyed, hank of hair askew, hands jammed in the pockets of his jeans, Penn's standing at his center seat a few rows back, staring at the still-blank screen while we all stare at him.

"I think it speaks for itself," he croaks, squinting, pitched forward like a pirate on the plank. "I hope you like it."

Uh-oh. Old-school celebrity-journalism rules are few and simple: If you tape, bring lots of batteries. Before you leave your hotel, floss and pee -- in that order. Above all, beware the screening. You can't avoid it if your star has a movie coming out, but watching it before you hook up is lose-lose: If it sucks, you must pretend you loved it anyhow; if you adored it -- in fifteen years, this has occurred exactly never -- the star won't believe you mean it. In 1998, I sat through a screening of The Muse before I met with Albert Brooks, and I had to spend the rest of our two-day date basically telling a fat girl her ass was awesome. And now the man-beast it took eight men to hold back in Mystic River -- Penn had to be fed oxygen between takes, and Clint Eastwood, the director, had to keep piling on extras to restrain Penn; viewed in slow motion or real time, nobody in the scene is "acting" -- looks skittish enough to pinch a jagged brick into his briefs.

Worse, Penn doesn't act in the new film; he directed it. And while you can slice the greatest-living-actor hoo-ha eight ways to Sunday -- however you cut it, Sean Penn, forty-seven, has been part of that pie for years -- the three movies he has directed are small, dark, and difficult. The Indian Runner, based on a Springsteen song from Nebraska, is a Cain-and-Abel variant; The Crossing Guard is about a guy seeking to murder the drunk driver who killed his daughter; and The Pledge is the story of a retired cop's fruitless quest to nail a serial killer preying on little blond girls. All three are worthy films -- the latter two are anchored by top-notch work from Penn's pal Jack Nicholson, the soundtracks glisten, and the meandering subservience of plot to character brings back the sweet seventies of Ashby, Altman, and Cassavetes. Their palette of emotion, though, runs from broody and dismal to grimly redemptive exhaustion. Put it this way: At Cannes, The Indian Runner got a long standing ovation. "Now I know," Penn said to the audience, "what it feels like to be Jerry Lewis."

And tonight: Into the Wild, from the 1996 nonfiction bildungsroman best-seller about Christopher McCandless, a rich kid with itchy feet and high ideals whose hunger for freedom, truth, goodness, purity, nature, and self-knowledge led him on a two-year journey that ended in Alaska, where he made his home in an abandoned bus for four months and starved to death. It's a lovely, sad, and inspiring book. You can see right away why a moviemaker would want to turn it into a movie, and just as fast you can think up good reasons not to -- starting with the fact that it's a lovely, sad, inspiring book about a rich kid who slowly starves to death, alone in an abandoned bus.

Yet the movie -- I shit you not -- is better, a fearless, full-hearted beauty. Penn wrote it big, shot it epic -- spacious skies, fruited plains and amber waves of grain, and, in all her fearsome majesty, Alaska -- got Eddie Vedder to cough up an open-road opera, and gave Vince Vaughn a few precious minutes to hot-wire the whole operation, in return for which Vince gave Sean something missing from his prior movies: fun.

But what lifts Into the Wild to greatness is the no-name who plays the dead kid -- Emile Hirsch. It's a game physical performance -- he's visibly skeletal by movie's end -- but that ain't half its depth. On the page, McCandless is framed by irony and the author's judgments; on the screen -- Hirsch is there almost every second -- he's an immense spirit, overflowing with joy. And Penn never judges or distances himself; he celebrates.

Early on, here is Hirsch hunkered on the sun-dazzled roadside, munching an apple, goofing.

"You're really good," he tells the fruit, his voice throaty with lust and rising in beatific wonder. "You're like a hundred, a thousand times better than any apple I've ever had. You're a super apple. You're so tasty. You're so organic. So natural. You're the apple of my eye."

Then, with the camera already tight on him, he crooks his starry-eyed mug right into the lens, grinning madly. And as Eddie Vedder's jet-engine roar torques into a "gonna rise up" lyric, well, good gosh, you'd have to be a golem not to feel goosebumps and some kind of love. Which means you'll likely sniffle come the end.

And what beyond that you'd ever ask of any movie, screening or not, I surely don't know.