code for the role.) I remember being
jarred by his presence in the film: What’s
the pervy hipster from “Girls” doing in
the nineteenth century? But Driver has
a range and an intensity that have trans-
formed him into one of Hollywood’s
most unconventional leading men. In
just six years, he has worked with an
astonishing roster of directors: Spike
Lee, Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch,
Steven Soderbergh, the Coen broth-
ers. Scorsese, who cast him as a seven-
teenth-century Jesuit priest, in “Silence,”
told me that he was impressed by Dri-
ver’s “seriousness, his dedication, his
understanding of what we were trying
to do.” When I asked Lee, who directed
Driver last year in his Oscar-nominated
performance in “BlacKkKlansman,”
why directors were drawn to him, he
said, “There’s a very simple answer:
game respects game.”
Driver has the bearing of a self-effac-
ing vulture and a face like an Easter Is-
land statue. (Not since Anjelica Hus-
ton has a movie star so embodied the
concept of jolie laide.) Despite his stolid
presence, his characters are often
thwarted and befuddled—high-strung
alpha males driven by an ancient code
of valor but tripped up by contempo-
rary frustrations, like a Cro-Magnon
man airdropped into Bed-Stuy and
handed the wrong person’s latte. Jar-
musch, who cast Driver as a poetry-
writing bus driver, in “Paterson,” and as
a hapless police officer who fights zom-
bies, in “The Dead Don’t Die,” pointed
to his “unusual usualness.” Directors
love his peculiar contradictions and his
syncopated speech. (When the trailer
for “The Dead Don’t Die” was released,
in April, the Internet went briefly gaga
over his elongated pronunciation of the
word “ghouls.”) “He’s very disciplined,
and yet he can be absolutely goofy,”Terry Gilliam, who directed Driver in
“The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,”
told me. Soderbergh cast him in the
heist comedy “Logan Lucky” after see-
ing him on “Girls.” “He seemed to be
operating with some different kind of
compass,” Soderbergh said. “His phys-
icality, his speech rhythms were all un-
expected and yet totally organic. You
didn’t feel like he was putting on a show
or that it was mannered. He just seemed
to be from another universe.”
In 2013, a column in Variety posited
that Hollywood was suffering from a
“Leading Man Crisis.” George Clooney,
Brad Pitt, and Will Smith were all mid-
dle-aged, and few younger actors seemed
poised to take their place. But, six years
later, there appears to be no shortage of
leading men. Hollywood is awash in
sad-eyed brooders (Ryan Gosling, Jake
Gyllenhaal), muscled he-men (Chan-
ning Tatum, Dwayne Johnson), sophis-
ticated gents (Benedict Cumberbatch,
Eddie Redmayne), high-spirited under-
dogs (Michael B. Jordan, Ryan Reyn-
olds), bug-eyed misfits (Rami Malek,
Jared Leto), and the interchangeable
hunks known as the Chrises: Evans,
Hemsworth, Pine, and Pratt.
Driver doesn’t fit any of these molds.
In some ways, he’s a throwback to the
off-center movie stars of the seventies—
Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Jack Nich-
olson—who blurred the line between
matinée idol and character actor and
infused their roles with a sense of alien-
ation and neurosis. Next month, he
stars in two films, each as a man navi-
gating a tortuous modern maze. In
Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story,”
he plays a theatre director whose di-
vorce from an actress (played by Scar-
lett Johansson) turns into a nightmar-
ish, yet totally ordinary, ordeal. In “The
Report,” directed by Scott Z. Burns,
he plays the former Senate staffer Dan-
iel J. Jones, who spent years investi-
gating the C.I.A.’s use of torture in
the war on terror, only to be stymied
by Washington bureaucracy. Soder-
bergh, who produced “The Report,”
told me, of Driver, “He just radiates
obsession, and that is what ‘The Re-
port’ needed above anything else: some-
body that you believed would willingly
lock himself in a room for five years
to perform a task that may or may not
end up being relevant or even known.”