Los Angeles — Look at him standing there, a great big movie star in a great big movie, the Iron Man with nary a trace of human frailty. A scant five years ago the only time you saw Robert Downey Jr. getting big play in your newspaper came when he was on a perp walk.

Yet when it came time for Marvel Studios to cast the lead for a huge franchise film, "Iron Man," it bet on Downey. He is not only back in the game but at the top of it. Is this a great country or what?

Zade Rosenthal / Paramount Pictures / MCT (ENLARGE)
Robert Downey Jr. stars as billionaire industrialist Tony Stark aka Iron Man in 'Iron Man.'
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For years, Downey has been tagged with two shorthand references: "The greatest actor of his generation" (for his Oscar-nominated role in "Chaplin") was usually quickly followed by "drug-addled lowlife" (based on multiple arrests and relapses). When it comes to that duality Downey is elliptical, but there is no mistaking that beneath all that allegorical talk there is the beating heart of a ferociously ambitious actor. Now sober, highly productive (he'll be in Ben Stiller's "Tropic Thunder" this summer) and very much engaged as he sits in his home at the end of a cul-de-sac in Brentwood, Downey seems less surprised than the rest of us.

"The people who made this movie said they were going to screen-test some people, and I thought: 'Well, that's how I got 'Chaplin.' Maybe this will work again,'" he said. "If you're going to spend a hundred million bucks on a movie, why not see who works?"

It doesn't take much more than a viewing of the "Iron Man" trailer to sense that Downey walked on the set and said, "Yeah, I got this." And there is a sincere logic behind his casting in this estimated $130 million movie, scheduled to open May 2. The back story of genius-inventor-billionaire-arms dealer Tony Stark is plenty textured: He likes big weapons and fast women and seems to have misplaced his conscience, so it makes sense that the man who steps into both his suit of armor and his role as superhero has manifest feet of clay. After a life of squandered promise spreading mayhem everywhere, our hero has a near-death experience and finds within himself the angel of his better nature. Ring any bells?

"There are things we know about just from reading the newspaper," said Jeff Bridges, who plays a surprisingly affable villain to Downey's superhero. "He doesn't have to do anything to make it happen. The audience brings that darker part of the story into the theater. And his wit and improvisation bring it home."

Jon Favreau, the writer of "Swingers" and the director of "Elf" and now "Iron Man," said that casting Downey was far from a source of stress.

"Nobody went to see a movie about the pirate ride at Disneyland," Favreau said by phone. "They got interested in it because of Johnny Depp. When Robert was cast in 'Iron Man,' it was as if a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. He was not the obvious choice, but my larger fear was making a mediocre movie; the landscape of the superhero is very picked over. I knew that Robert's performance would elevate the movie."

When serious actors take on jobs involving comic books and hours in machines and makeup, they generally plug their noses and take the paycheck. Downey is having none of that. At 43, he is thrilled to be fit enough — he had spent the morning with the living room furniture pushed aside for instruction in wing chun, a Chinese martial art built on aggressive, close combat — to play a hero. He views the Big Comic Book Movie as a kind of arrival after years of lead roles in movies like "The Singing Detective" and "The Gingerbread Man," which had cinematic pedigrees but little in the way of audiences.

"I've been in big movies before and never had a problem with them," he said, munching a carry-out lunch of sole underneath a gigantic Tobias Keene painting (one of two in the room). "What is creepy and obvious is that the market was suddenly flooded with morons who thought, 'If I've got $500,000, I can make a baseball cap that has a company name on it and say I'm a filmmaker.'

"On the contrary," he added, "I am thrilled to have made this movie with Jon. I seem to have been the person who's had to wait the longest for this kind of gratification." He leaned forward as he spoke. "It took a while. Richard Attenborough," he said, invoking the name of the director of "Chaplin," "told me that one day your ambition will supersede all of these other impulses you have, and that will help set you straight."

Downey's ambition is getting some other room to work. Later this summer he will show up as Kirk Lazarus in "Tropic Thunder," a comedy that throws multiple grenades at war movie cliches. Downey's character is an extremely mannered Australian Method actor who undergoes a pigment change to play a soulful black soldier. There is rich historical resonance in the turn. In his writer-director father's signature film, "Putney Swope," the senior Downey substituted his own voice for that of Arnold Johnson, his black lead. (In "Tropic Thunder," however, the racial co-option is mocked mightily by the character played by Brandon T. Jackson, a member of the platoon who is black.) And he has just finished filming "The Soloist," about a homeless schizophrenic who nurses hopes of performing at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

So, superhero, arch comic in blackface and sympathetic nutball. Not inconsistent with a career that has included "Chaplin," "Natural Born Killers," "Less Than Zero" and "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," among some 50 other films.

Then again, he was extraordinary in other ways, once showing up to meet the director Mike Figgis two hours late, barefoot, with a loaded shotgun he could not quite explain. It was a while in coming, but in 1996 police officers who stopped Downey noticed he was packing an unloaded .357 Magnum, along with small amounts of heroin and cocaine. Just a month after that he was cited for trespassing and being under the influence of a controlled substance after passing out in a neighbor's (empty at the time) home.

There were rehabs that did not work, followed by jails that did not impress, ending in hard time, twice, including a one-year stretch in a state lockup where he had to fight to find a place to stand.

"I have a really interesting political point of view, and it's not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can't go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can't. I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics every since."

His romance with mood-altering chemicals didn't end after he got out of prison. By 2003, he was an uninsurable serial relapser famous for being pulled out of hotels or other people's homes in an addled, disheveled state. As a movie star with a lot of pals, he lived a life beyond consequence until he finally wore out the endless mercies of the entertainment business. After he was fired from his spot on "Ally McBeal," the bottom finally came, at a Burger King of all places.

On or around Independence Day in 2003, he stopped at a Burger King on the Pacific Coast Highway and threw all his drugs in the ocean. And while he was sitting there chewing on a burger, he decided he was done. This being America, five years later you can walk into that Burger King, and if you order a Kids Meal you can get your own Robert Downey Jr. action figure, wrapped up in gadget ware. (And what does Tony Stark want when he escapes his kidnappers? A good old American cheeseburger — from Burger King, natch.)

Today he appears to be happily married, to the producer Susan Levin, and to have a good relationship with his teenage son from a previous marriage, Indio, who stops by at the end of the interview. All of this has come to rest in a gorgeous but not gigantic house, in a room suffused with light that bounces off a grand piano that preoccupies the room and much of his free time. It's the kind of story that might make some misty, but Downey is more prone to the mystical.

"If I see somebody who is throwing their life away with both hands and is raging around and destroying their family, I can't understand that person," he said. "I'm not in that sphere of activity anymore, and I don't understand it any more than I understood 10 or 20 years ago that somehow everything was going to turn out OK from this lousy, exotic and dark triple chapter of my life. I swear to God I don't even really understand that planet anymore."