Francesco Corrozinni

Sure, he hasn't had his eggs yet, but it's got to be said: James Franco looks a little ragged along the seams at 8:45 in the morning. Unshaven. Inky at his edges and out of sorts. The brown T-shirt hangs on his shoulders like the wind blew it there. He's catfooted and somehow goofy of gait. And that mustache is a wish.

He generally fits the bill of a vaguely hungover, Lower East Side, semi-academic hipster artist living the unraveling agenda of Tuesday-morning being and nothingness. He sits by a side door near a pail of mop water. There's a paperback, palm-pinched, cover down, in his right hand, and a big plastic shopping bag full up with something he doesn't want to show just yet. When asked what he's reading, Franco smiles his ungrudgingly adolescent smile, a grin as terminally satisfying as the last healthy squeeze on a tube of toothpaste. He is engaging, for just a second, in the mutual diction of actor and artist — "It's for a project," he says. But the word — project — thumps out of him unprecious and without bluster, as if he were naming a day of the week. He's always got something going. He flips the book over. Twilight.

Keep in mind: The position of things is such that he doesn't have to show the book. Had he said Jude the Obscure, no one would have been the wiser. He's a graduate student, after all, enrolled in two universities at pretty much any given moment. "It's crazy how much sexual tension there is," he says. "It just builds and builds. I mean it never stops. It's sort of explosive by the end. Crazy. Like they'll blow up with it. And of course, they don't." He shrugs then, a good shrug, because he is selling nothing with it. "Which is the point too, I guess."

Sometimes Franco goes a little hypnotic with the eye contact. What starts as a steady gaze generally transmutes into the oddly pleased squint that is his war paint, a look that allows him to play both stoner and supervillain with the same incredulous vacancy. He sighs a little, apologetic. "You probably know I have a lot of projects," he says. "But that one is way, way off. It's just something I'm thinking about." He whisks at something in the air then. "Off in the distance. Way off."

These words are so bloated and vague, they almost bob in the air. Franco knows this. "Okay. I want to write a children's book." He guts out a laugh, snorting himself off the hook. "Someday." This is a kind of hedge — people are constantly vetting his agenda, because it is unlike the typical high-quote actor's, because it is puzzlingly arcane, because he isn't notching his belt or collecting motorcycles or figuring out new enthusiasms in laboratory drugs, because that agenda appears to have nothing to do with being a rich, laconic, and ultimately free thirty-two-year-old male.

And because so far, it's seemed like piling on. He's already an emergent A-list movie star, a performance artist, a perpetual and enthusiastic graduate student. (Fiction writing, in the M.F.A. program at Columbia. Film student, enrolled at NYU.) He tells me he's been accepted for enrollment to Ph.D. programs in creative writing. He recently got into the Rhode Island School of Design.

It is tempting to draw him in a series of contradictory smidges. As the ne'er-do-well Franco who routinely leaves movie sets to fly to one coast or the other to attend a university workshop or evening graduate seminar. Or as the actor Franco who tilted around the $2.5 billion Spider-Man troika, looking utterly unconvinced and just a little bit amused as he kept a ten-story-tall sandman at bay using a jet-propelled sled. The same actor Franco who made an unlikely twenty-five-episode incursion into General Hospital, playing a creepy, off-kilter performance artist named Franco.

Franco, our Franco, has an art opening tomorrow. A multiroom installation called "The Dangerous Book Four Boys" in a thirteenth-floor gallery in TriBeCa. Walls will be lined with his photographs, gritty, theatrical Polaroids and silver-etched desert landscapes. Every room will have video playback. Some will have chairs, so people can sit to watch videos that Franco made in one graduate program or another — plywood rockets burning in the desert, a man with a sledgehammer at the edge of some asphalt, close-ups of men pissing. One film, a herky-jerk seminarrative in which Franco dashes through the Louvre wearing a penis on his nose, will briefly feature the always thrilling documentation of human defecation. And there will be wine.

"I showed that last movie at NYU last month, at a faculty critique," Franco says, flinching a little. "It's a fairly confrontational piece, and it got a little ugly. One faculty member — she's always tough on me, but she flat-out called me an asshole. She jumped me. She was muttering it the whole time: What an asshole. What an asshole."

Moments like that can break grad students. One scissoring word choice from a program chair, an eye roll here or there, an exchange of withering phrasings between faculty, forever memorable for their clever cruelty — these things can be crushing enough that by the next summer the student in question is hanging decks with his brother-in-law in Skokie. It's like American Idol for the black-turtleneck crowd. You gotta have thick skin, whale skin.

Franco has this in spades. Maybe it has to do with the fact that he's been a working actor since he was seventeen, that he gave up school at nineteen to take on a role on the iconic and forever cult-worthy Freaks and Geeks. The guy's been working for nearly half his life. This breeds either confidence that might be misread as arrogance, or a focus that might be misread as impudence. He leans forward. "I didn't blame her for being mad. She'd brought her child," he says. "But I mean, come on. Who brings a child to a graduate-school film showing?" Franco chalks it up, unhurt, undeterred. "The film fits inside the larger project anyway, this exhibit. I see why people don't get it."

Photo Credit: Francesco Corrozinni

Of course, Franco has other openings coming up, too, in pretty much every cineplex in existence. He's got a supporting role in Eat, Pray, Love, a kind of soft porn for unhappy thirty-six-year-old women. Then he's up for a starring turn in the new Danny Boyle film, 127 Hours, as a mountain climber who, trapped in the Utah desert, amputates his own arm to get out from under a boulder. This month he'll appear as Allen Ginsberg in art-house sure thing Howl. Then in a Danny McBride comedy, Your Highness, about two brothers who are princes. All of this in the next year. He's started work on the Planet of the Apes sequel, which gives hope to nostalgic forty-five-year-old fanboys everywhere. So how does he pick this stuff? What's the plan? Did he even read Eat, Pray, Love? Later, walking to the barbershop, when asked this very question, he will laugh — at finding himself in such a movie and at the shambling Alphabet City hottie and whiny spiritualist he plays. "What can I say about Eat, Pray, Love?" he says. "Let's see ..." Then he pauses for a solid fifteen seconds. When Franco speaks, his tone is guiltless, his affect amused. "You know, in Eat, Pray, Love, my character mostly appears in the first twenty pages of the book," he says, and now the smile is broad, inviting, self-aware. "And I can definitely say I read the first twenty pages."

At the diner, Franco reaches into his bag and pulls out a Polaroid camera, hands it over, then pulls out one for himself. "I figure we can just shoot each other," he says. "We'll make a project out of the morning. We're going for a straight shave, right?"

We are doing just that, but the cameras are hard to figure. The real photo shoot is done, days past. Whose project is this? Who set this up? Franco looks almost hurt by the question. "Me," he says. "I just figured it would help you guys out." He holds the bag open, reveals twenty boxes of film. "I got a lot," he says. "You can shoot whatever you want, as much as you want."

He stares deeply, right into the shot, then pulls the camera back and snaps one off. "You can just do it randomly," he says, taking a picture of his toast. "Documentation."

The cameras whirl out a storm of white squares, each fading backward into a representation of the otherwise unremarkable morning that Franco is living. He's going to get a shave after this, to knock the scruff off, try the shop-made tonic, see where that takes him. The day is ahead. These then are lovingly random "before" shots: his toast, the floor, his bony shoulders, the pubey little chin hair, the occasional blank glance, his pale face dark against the wall of light from the street. He doesn't care that he looks sickly in some shots or that his eyes are closed in others. He doesn't seem to care if he's even in the pictures at all. He likes one in which a woman carrying a Boston terrier and a bag of oranges passes by the window. He's right, it's pretty cool.

Steady and unpretentious in his appraisals, he regards the images with a patience one does not often find in movie stars sitting in public places. It's clear he'd do this for days and days, purely on the compact of the assignment he's given himself, that he'd be willing to keep snapping these images until he found what he was looking for. This version of himself, the student, is not one Franco seems willing to surrender. "Acting doesn't do very much for me," he says flatly. "I put off school for it, but it's not like it was a sacrifice or anything. I really didn't miss school until I went back. Or maybe I missed it and nobody believed that, not even me. The work of it — and I have really great teachers — that's the stuff that adds up for me in a way that acting doesn't."

No matter how long you stand at the opposite corner of James Franco's art opening, no matter how far from him you stand, no matter how thick the crowd gets, it is impossible not to see that he's prepared, that he's happy, that he likes the argument, the provocation of it all. He's up to it. Whale skin. One might hasten to point out that nothing rides on this for him, and that this is the confidence-man aspect of Franco's game, operating within the brutal, parochial Darwinism of the contemporary art world with impunity, simply because he is a movie star and he knows it.

Still, the guy works, manic and openhearted. There are five rooms' worth of that work here, work that coalesces into a fairly cohesive exploration of boyhood, sexuality, and something that is distinctly Franco's, a vision of a guy comically trapped in what everybody in the celebrity-mad republic presumes to be the best job in the world: movie star. And all of the exhibit, every bit, is wholly unrelated to the enervating measures of Hollywood success. These infiltrations — into the world of art, the classroom, the gallery, the soap-opera set — have to be a relief to a guy whose job as a movie star, rightly or wrongly, presents him with questions he doesn't care about answering. The exhibit prompts the question: Who gives a shit about an image of a plywood rocket burning on a salt flat, even when that image is projected on the inside walls of an identical version of that rocket? No one profits from it. But who really cares about the weekend gross of Eat, Pray, Love, except those who stand to profit from it?

That's why Franco greets everyone who approaches at the opening warmly, that's why he's a restless, resilient, and, yes, legitimate student. He likes the questions of all this. And of course he's not afraid at this opening. He's opening everywhere, all the time.

But no matter how many times you click play, it's kind of hard to watch James Franco on General Hospital, playing Franco, that simulacrum of himself, a kind of Ed Wood manqué. This is the artist Franco, our Franco, using acting in a performance of the role of a performance artist. But the timing seems a little off, his tone slightly out of concert. A lot of layers of meaning. Very sticky, and pseudoacademic.

Maybe — no, surely — this is on purpose. Because James Franco is a very good actor. He stole the show in Pineapple Express, as a strangely thoughtful burnout. He nailed a supporting role lip-to-lip with Sean Penn in Milk and gave an underrated performance in Paul Haggis's quiet triumph, In the Valley of Elah. He's about to enter the realm of leading man simply because he does exactly what a movie star does: makes you want a lot more of him.

Before we enter Barbiere, a boutique barbershop that makes men feel like new men, where we're set up for the shave, Franco rolls this reaction over. "Bad? You thought it was bad?" It makes him laugh, not because it's inconceivable, more because he's curious. There is a clarification: not bad. Uncomfortable to watch.

He thinks. "I'm glad it made you uncomfortable," he says. We enter the barbershop. "The point was, I was uncomfortable. It's a very different world, different style of acting. And we knew people would recognize me, that they wouldn't accept me as Franco. In some ways, I can't be anyone else but James Franco. That can be uncomfortable, too."

In the shop, Franco politely introduces himself and doles out his cameras once again. "That project began a long time before I went on the soap opera. The truth is, on General Hospital, everyone recognizes me as the movie actor. That's the thing. I'm kind of stuck as myself."

The barber twirls a towel down over his face and James Franco, our Franco, disappears beneath it. Minutes later, lotion is applied to his cheeks, and the razor laid against the soft flesh of his neck. The barber asks him not to talk while he works with the blade. The barber takes his pulls. Eventually a new Franco emerges. This Franco rubs his own face with just a little wonder, as if his were the skin of an exotic, cool-blooded animal. He likes it. He wishes the mustache away. Sometimes even he wants to see the movie star.

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