Michael Pitt has played so many wasted, blown-out, emotionally unhinged young men in his day that it’s easy to forget that one of his first big breaks came in the form of a 15-episode arc as a high school football player-a quarterback, no less-on the late-’90s hit TV series Dawson’s Creek.
It’s ironic, then, that since then, Pitt has largely devoted himself to inhabiting a motley crew of characters that are the spiritual antitheses of the Big Man on Campus-a rebellious teen in Larry Clark’s ode to adolescent sex, drug abuse, and amorality Bully (2001); a naïve American in Paris on the eve of the revolution of ’68 in Bernardo Bertolucci’s sexually charged The Dreamers (2003); a lonely, isolated Kurt Cobain-esque rock star in Gus Van Sant’s quietly powerful Last Days (2005); a psychopath who takes an entire family hostage in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (2007)-working with a list of directors who’ve got their share of Palme d’Ors and Independent Spirit Awards amongst them.
Indeed, there’s something eternally fallen about the way Pitt looks, still slightly baby-faced at the age of 29, but with the optimism of that youthfulness betrayed by his perpetually stubbled cheeks and a set of eyes that seem to easily radiate a psychic sadness.
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