But, in a 12-step sense, a bottom is not necessarily a bad thing, wherever it is. Once you get there, you've got nowhere to go but up. Downey takes 12-step recovery very seriously. He says he does not think he was too harshly punished when he was sent to prison. Of one bust, which was a result of an anonymous tip, presumably from someone looking to profit from tabloid scandal, he says: ''People go, 'Oh, you were set up, man, this guy dropped a dime on you.' And I'm like, at that point, don't blame it on anyone. It was just flagrant disregard. No one's ever set me up except me.''

On the principle that anonymity is part of the program, he prefers not to discuss either his story or his recovery in great detail, except in ego-feint asides: ''I guess sometimes I want to have a drink with dinner. But then I remember that I have plans for Christmas.'' He goes to meetings -- regular ones, rather than the private, not-in-the-meeting-book kind that exist for the famous in Los Angeles and New York. ''I have more in common with people who aren't at secret meetings than I do with the people who are at secret meetings going, 'We have special needs.' ''

He also practices yoga and wing chun, floats in an isolation tank and is subject, voluntarily, to random drug testing for Falconer, among others. The program is clearly something that is in him, not shellacked on; he can reel off what are known in A.A. parlance as ''the promises,'' two paragraphs from the Alcoholics Anonymous ''Big Book,'' something that no one who was just going through the motions could do. No addict, with or without a history of relapse, is ever free from that prospect. And the person who is prone to going through five different arcs of emotion in two minutes is never going to have a wholly easy time in life. But then again, neither is the person who isn't.

The phrase that his friends use to describe the difference between Downey then and Downey now is that he is more comfortable in his own skin, more secure. For the last six months, he has been seriously involved with Susan Levin, a producer of ''Gothika.'' The two see each other daily and check in with each other by phone constantly. (Downey, who has long had ''Indio'' tattooed on his right shoulder, now has ''Susie Q'' tattooed on his left.)

And he is sanguine, both about recovery and about the professional difficulties he might continue to confront. The money from ''The Singing Detective'' and ''Gothika'' has already been spent paying off debts. He might be filing for bankruptcy in the not-too-distant future. For the interim, he is living rent-free in what he describes as ''a ratty old ranch house'' in Malibu on some property owned by Jonathan Elias. Downey says: ''He said: 'Oh, my God, look at him, he's homeless again. Put him up in Malibu in one of those houses we're going to tear down. Go to Ikea. Get him a flat-screen TV. And he'll be happy for about a week.' ''

The house is indeed sparsely and inexpensively furnished, with Indian bedspreads on the windows and incense burners in almost every room. But it's clearly not all serenity. There's a hole in the exterior plasterboard of his bedroom, which he kicked when angry about something he declines to explain. In the area around the hole, he has written, in black marker, ''I kicked 'the habit.' '' The walls around his bed are also covered with drawing and writing: ''Prayer''; ''Critical List: A) Friendship; B) Trust; C) Growth/Change; D) Sanctity/Honor''; ''Fierceness, fidelity, care of family, wolves mate for life.'' Like many, if not all, phrases and principles related to A.A., these may sound simplistic, even silly, to people who know, without effort, how to live by them. Anyone in the program, or close to someone who is, would recognize them as representing the commitment to faith and recovery that they are.

Downey's history with recovery as well as with drugs long predates the press coverage. He had in fact already been in three rehabilitation facilities between 1987 and 1996 without, as he says, ''the nudge from the judge.'' It is an oddity of Downey's reputation as a celebrity addict that the extensive publicity surrounding it makes his uneven pattern of recovery seem both exceptionally dramatic and drastic, when it is actually so typical that you might hear a story like his in, say, approximately two out of any five A.A. meetings. Another is that in a business well stocked with the fragile, he is not that exceptional an insurance risk; most everyone who has worked with him agrees that he has never wandered onto the wrong set in a blackout and passed out. ''I'd work with him on anything,'' says Joel Silver, whose company produced ''Gothika.'' ''I'll use him again in a second. I'll try to put him in anything I can.'' Basically, as an addict, Downey is only exceptional in that he got so very publicly caught. It used to bother him when people said they believed in him; it seemed condescending and a comment on his liabilities rather than a commendation of his assets. But it doesn't anymore.

''If I didn't believe in myself, there's no way I would have made it this far,'' Downey says, sitting in his son's bedroom in his actually not-so-ratty ranch house in Malibu. ''But which self are we talking about? I know that I am currently embracing a much more authentic and much less complex me. One that doesn't have to hold on to that thing, the part of my whole package that is that I'm this wild, unpredictable, tragic and self-destructive guy. It's so passé, but it did work for me. Now I am culpable and accountable for the things that got me to that impasse where I was just running, running, running, with nothing to show for it. But again, that's me saying that having something to show for it has to be . . . stuff. And I've had all the stuff before. The big spread and the cars and the dough and all that. It is nice to have. But it's nicer to be free from the attachment to identifying with it.'' All he has to do is hold on hard enough, just hard enough, to have the pull of the wave dissipate.