On the inside of his left wrist, LaBeouf has a tattoo that reads, “1986–2004.” Those are the years of his childhood, until he turned 18. “It’s a reminder,” he says. “A lot of people who were on shows when they were younger say, ‘Oh, man, I worked my whole life. I forgot my childhood.’ ”

He grew up in Echo Park, a mostly Latino neighborhood near downtown L.A., living with his parents and a rotating cast of lodgers in a first-floor apartment on Glendale Boulevard. His French Cajun father, Jeffrey LaBeouf, was a clown from San Francisco who had spent time in France studying commedia dell’arte. “This was before Cirque du Soleil came here,” says Shia, “so there was still the pop clown—like the Britney Spears of clowns—and then there was the Mötley Crüe of clowns. My dad was that. He opened for the Doobie Brothers. He trained a chicken to jump through a hoop of fire. He was a stand-up comic for a while, and a rodeo clown.”

He was also a drug trafficker, according to his son. “He had friends from the military who had helicopters, and they’d be in Hawaii cropping [marijuana] in areas that were uncharted,” says LaBeouf. “And in L.A. he did the same thing, but he did it on the sides of freeways. He’d pull up in his Camaro, collect the weed, and put it in the trunk. That was a day with my dad.”

Shia’s mother, Shayna, was a former ballet dancer from New York who had studied with Martha Graham and once ran a head shop across the street from Tompkins Square Park. Her father—Shia’s namesake—had escaped from the Nazis in Poland and moved to the Lower East Side, where he was a barber and did stand-up comedy on the side. “My mom is the backbone not just of my family but of many families,” LaBeouf says. “She’s extraordinarily spiritual. She’s the woman in the tribe that people go to when shit’s fucked up, because she’s dealt with so many wild things in her life and been so stable.” One of those things was her husband’s spiraling drug habit. “It wasn’t that he was a bad father, because he was a great father,” LaBeouf says. “I couldn’t have wished for a better father, especially for what I’m doing now. But at the time, the party never stopped for him.”

LaBeouf continues, “He took a hotel cart—you know, what they put the soaps and stuff on—and he built a snow-cone machine, and he made this portable circus. It had snow cones and hot dogs and popcorn and cotton candy. He would dress up like a clown, and he’d have all of us dress up as clowns, and we’d go into Echo Park and sell hot dogs.”

If that sounds a little like child abuse, it’s no worse than what happened to Buster Keaton, whose vaudevillian parents used to toss him around the stage by a suitcase handle attached to his back. “There’s a lot of actors like that,” LaBeouf says. “The best don’t come from the suburbs. The best come from the street, the bottom of the barrel. At least my favorites do. It’s something you can draw on.”

If the family didn’t sell the day’s hot dogs, guess what was for dinner. “I can’t tell you how many hot dogs I’ve eaten in my life,” he says. “We had these inventive ways of making them. It looked like Wolfgang Puck, but it was two hot dogs.”

When Shia was five, the family moved to Tujunga, in the Crescenta Valley, which he describes as “a biker town, a town you pass on your way to someplace else.” His father checked into a veterans’ hospital, where he spent a year and a half kicking his addictions. “He was drinking heavily and probably doing other stuff,” LaBeouf remembers. “He wouldn’t do it around me back then. He would smoke weed in the house, and my mom would smoke weed, too, but people who smoke weed never turn into monsters. It’s when you start doing coke and heroin—that’ll change your personality.” Around that time, Jeffrey and Shayna split up.