For an actor who has cultivated an image of relative Hollywood hermitude, Joaquin Phoenix has been awfully visible lately, fidgeting uncomfortably in a spotlight that nonetheless keeps landing on him. This week, his starring role in Gus van Sant’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot hits cinemas in the US – and depending on where you are in the world, it’s his third major release of 2018 so far.

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In the UK, the March cinema schedule gave us a particularly disconcerting Phoenix double-whammy. One week, he was a taciturn, tortured assassin exacting grievous violence on toxic men in Lynne Ramsay’s brutal stunner You Were Never Really Here. The next, he was literally Jesus Christ – still taciturn, definitely still tortured, but ostensibly a more benevolent presence – in Garth Davis’s prettily soporific religious drama Mary Magdalene. (Or, as atheistic wags might also call it, You Were Never Really Here.) The performances may have had more in common than they would in the hands of most other actors – you’ve never seen the son of God quite this blearily emo – but the ideological whiplash between the projects was still striking. (With Mary Magdalene still mired in Weinstein Company legal quicksand, Americans will find this out when, if ever, it gets released.)

Phoenix isn’t done for the year, either: this autumn, we’ll see his starring role in the darkly comic gold rush western The Sisters Brothers, the first English-language film by the esteemed French auteur Jacques Audiard. By any measure, that’s a robust quartet of projects, at least in terms of prestige and intent (Mary Magdalene turned out to be a critical and commercial non-event, though it wasn’t for want of ambition on the part of anyone involved).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joaquin Pheonix in Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot. Photograph: Scott Patrick Green/AP

Phoenix would have to be pretty spectacular in the Audiard film to supplant You Were Never Really Here as the high point of not only Phoenix’s year, but just about any actor’s: as Joe, the silent-storm hitman concealing tidal waves of trauma beneath a grizzled, ungiving exterior, he brought sore-souled complexity, psychic pain and a stoic streak of gallows humour to what would otherwise be a familiar noir type. It’s a characterisation that ranks with his raddled, feckless sociopath Freddie Quell from Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master as perhaps the richest of his career so far, and it justly won him best actor at Cannes last year; by rights, it should net him a fourth Oscar nomination, though the odds are against Academy voters having the stomach for Ramsay’s visceral, despairing film.

Perhaps they’ll gravitate toward Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot instead, for which he’s garnered further glowing notices – notwithstanding protests from some quarters about casting an able-bodied actor in the role of a quadriplegic. Phoenix plays the real-life cartoonist John Callahan, with the film tracking his journey to sobriety after the alcohol-abetted car accident that landed him in a wheelchair at the age of 21. It’s the kind of true story that could easily translate into icky inspirational pablum – particularly if the more maudlin Van Sant of Finding Forrester and Sea of Trees had shown up on set – but Phoenix’s presence alone provides the perverse, unsentimental wit that marks Callahan and his work.

Now in his 40s, the actor has long shown a knack for crinkling and darkening the edges of even the most straight-and-narrow films, since well before he gave us cinema’s scuzziest Jesus. We saw it as early as 1989, in Ron Howard’s bright family dramedy Parenthood, in which the 14-year-old Phoenix (then still going by the Christian name Leaf) quietly disrupted the sitcom tone of proceedings with his portrait of a withdrawn, nascently porn-fixated adolescent. Eleven years later, he was a thrillingly strange, sinuous spanner in the robust Hollywood works of Gladiator, his venal emperor Commodus bringing not just boo-hiss villainy to proceedings, but a streak of vulnerably defensive irony and subtly queer sexuality; it was a performance inspired and unsettling enough to earn him his first Oscar nomination.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash in Walk The Line. Photograph: HO/REUTERS

It was the performance that essentially made Phoenix – then 26 and skew-whiff sexy, with that hard gaze and scarred lip that, for the most part, conveniently ruled him out of teenage-dream roles in his formative years – a star. Yet aside from a loopy pair of M Night Shyamalan projects and the handsome, trophy-chasing biopic duty of Walk the Line, in which he was more suited to Johnny Cash’s brand of hard-knock cool than the varnished film-making around him, he rarely acted accordingly. Forgoing studio cinema, he opted for a mixed bag of indies (such the misfires as It’s All About Love and Reservation Road) and developed a solemn, burnished collaboration with the Cannes-beloved, 1970s-inspired American auteur James Gray, culminating in a bittersweet romance, Two Lovers, that was a virtual paean to his anxious, anti-Hollywood-leading-man qualities.

That, of course, was the lead-up to I’m Still Here, the ambitious mockumentary stunt that for too long had the world convinced Phoenix was either a buffoon or a critically damaged egomaniac, and over as an actor either way. The convenient narrative would have had critics declaring Phoenix’s hilariously garbled, meta-upon-meta feat of self-parody as his crowning glory, if not for the unexpected upshot on the other side – as Phoenix rebounded from the lark with the most disciplined, detailed, straight-up acting of his career in The Master.

Since that watershed, there’s been no fooling about, even when the projects have been playful: Anderson’s Inherent Vice may have been a shaggy-dog stoner odyssey, but Phoenix’s spaced-sad, perfectly behind-the-beat comic delivery in it was perfectly studied. His delicate, nebbishy romantic ache in Spike Jonze’s Her was an unexpected, empathetic twist on his talents, while his Gray collaboration hit an operatic peak with the morally charred balance of evil and regret in his 1920s Ellis Island pimp in The Immigrant, still sadly unreleased in the UK – his final, spiritually wrecked scene in it is up with the best of Brando.

There have been missteps, albeit not thoughtless ones. He was saddled with one of the rotten modern-era Woody Allen scripts in Irrational Man, and would likely have proven ill-matched to Allen’s fussy, hyper-verbal neuroses even if he hadn’t been, while as interesting a pick as he is to play Jesus, he seems more glazed than intense in the beige, tasteful surroundings of Mary Magdalene – if it never gets seen stateside, his career certainly won’t be worse for it.

But if these are the blurry spots in Phoenix’s filmography as he heads into his middle age, he’s doing well — he’s even toying with the mainstream again, with his casting as the Joker in an upcoming origin story officially, as of this week, a go. That said, with a relatively low planned budget of $55m, Todd Phillips’ film is rumoured to be on the more experimental end of the blockbuster spectrum: the superhero machine may come for them all, it seems, yet Phoenix still gets to do it somewhat on his own terms. With Daniel Day-Lewis supposedly retired and the consensus title of Greatest Working Actor up for grabs, Phoenix’s latter-day CV makes as good a case as any. Not that he’d want to be called that, most likely — but if his recent, inventive run of activity has proven anything, it’s that his can’t-be-arsed persona, sealed in I’m Still Here and still wafting around him a decade later, is one hell of a performance.