NEW YORK — Glenn Beck is dressed to kill.

His show on Fox News hits in about an hour, and he’s ready in black suit, pink shirt, maroon tie — and black Converse Chuck Taylor high-top sneakers, no laces. The Chucks, like Beck himself, are upmarket with a dash of irreverence.

Depending on who’s talking, Beck, 45, is a hero, maniac, lightning rod. He calls himself “a guy on the radio bus.” That bumpy ride took him through Philadelphia and WPHT-AM, where he honed his skills, built a national audience, and — gasp — made the transition to cable-TV stardom.

Now he sits near the top of the cable universe. No. 3, to be exact. “The Glenn Beck Program” (which airs at 2 p.m. weekdays in the Bay Area) started only in January and is now the third-leading cable news show, behind Fox stablemates Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity — and third among all cable shows in its time period.

And tonight, his comedy-oriented concert show — “Glenn Beck’s Common Sense Tour” — will be shown live from Kansas City in movie theaters across much of the country. (On the West Coast, the show will be tape-delayed.)

It all began in Mount Vernon, Wash. “My mom gave me one of the ‘Golden Age of Radio’ albums,” Beck says, adding that he still has the album. The little boy was enchanted, and he started appearing on local radio soon after.

It’s been a long, hard ride on the radio bus. When Beck was 13, his mother lost her battle with depression and committed suicide. A brother would do the same; Beck and his father would become estranged. The radio bus wound through Provo, Utah; Baltimore; Houston; Phoenix; Washington. By the mid-1990s, he was close to the bottom.

“I came from an alcoholic background and became an alcoholic,” he says. “I burnt every bridge I had, including my first marriage.” The radio bus stopped at Alcoholics Anonymous.

When he remarried, his wife told him: “We need a church.” “So we did the American thing,” Beck says. “We shopped for a church.” In 1999, he and his family became members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Beck was fresh from converting an 18th-place time slot down in Tampa, Fla., to a market leader, fresh from syndicating “The Glenn Beck Program” nationally, when he came to Philadelphia’s WPHT in 2002.

In 2006, when he began a TV gig on CNN, he relocated the show to New York, and he now lives in New Canaan, Conn.

On set, you see close up that Beck’s energy has found a home. Inescapable is how loud he talks on camera. His manner is conversational — yet his volume reverberates throughout the set. Somehow, it not only works — it cranks. He’s famous for shouting, weeping, for that sense of an emotional volcano just beneath the surface, about to blow.

He begins a recent show, as always, with a high-energy shout-out to viewers: “If you believe this country is great, but there’s too much talk about change, and not enough action, or maybe too much change in a direction you weren’t expecting, declare yourself a 9/12-er, and come on, follow me.” With that, Beck strides to his desk.

Once there, he reviews what “the mainstream media” are covering. He jokes, speaks in dozens of character voices, makes faces (priceless faces), gestures. Sitting but not sitting still, he reviews the ill-advised New York flyover of Air Force One; the party switch of Sen. Arlen Specter, called “Spectator” and imitated in a gruff, old-guy voice; President Obama’s health-care plan (he simpers: “We’re gonna change the world”).

In his office, Beck says, “It’s really … entrepreneurial around here. I’m on my own. We live and die by the ratings.”

He says that he was a “reluctant” voter for George Bush in 2000 but that “he had me at 9/11.” Yet Beck started to “sour hard” on Bush because of what he said were government interference in private life, surrender of personal liberties and huge, heedless deficits.

Asked why Beck’s show prospers, Eric Boehlert, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, says: “Hate sells. If you talk hate, you can find 2 million people to watch you, especially if it’s right-wing hate.”

But Al Tompkins, group leader for broadcasting and online at the Poynter Institute, is less worried: “We have a long tradition of partisan media in America. And I think there’s a place for all of those voices in the spectrum of conversation. That’s good for democracy. But it’s not journalism.”

Beck agrees: “I like the word ‘opinionator’ — but I’ll take ‘entertainer.’ Nothing wrong with that. In every alcoholic family, one of the kids is a distractor, and that’s what I was. The entertainment part is me. That’s how I’ve always dealt with everything in my life.”