I asked about his life, his childhood, being a parent, his addiction issues. Each question brought 5 or 10 minutes of discursive talk. Deep meanings. Eternal things. When I asked about his early artistic influences, he said, “I was this far away from a black-and-white TV on University Place. It felt like I was born there. I was raised by a black-and-white RCA TV. Rod Serling. Bill Shatner. Hogan’s Heroes and Gilligan’s Island. The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. Antonio Fargas, on Starsky & Hutch and in Putney Swope. Alan Arbus and Hervé Villechaize, in Greaser’s Palace and on Fantasy Island.”

There’s something both manic and soothing in the way he speaks, the ease of it, how he jumps from topic to topic. Everything reminds him of everything.

When I asked about his father, his face lit up. “If you recall, the first round of really cool head-shop T-shirts—forget the Scott Baio tuxedo shirt—I’m talking about the Superman logo. I remember walking around the Village with my dad wearing a Superman shirt. We also had a prop king’s chair, a throne, that he would sit in.” “He was Superman and he was ruling?”

“Yeah. And he was a big guy, tall, dark, handsome—all that stuff.”

“It sounds like you had an interesting childhood.”

“Interesting is correct,” said Downey. “I’ve heard of people that had impossible-to-defend childhoods, and I say, ‘You had an interesting childhood.’ And occasionally it’s the folks who have had the most quote-unquote interesting childhoods and the most here-come-the-sirens idiosyncratic dispositions who push [the boundaries]. It’s amazing how many world leaders and icons were psychotic, or had breakdowns or whatever.”

Robert Downey Sr. made groundbreaking movies, many of them of the art-house variety. At his peak, in the 1970s, when Jr. was impressionable and small, Sr. was at the center of a creative scene, making Jr. the kid wandering among drunken adults. His mom, Elsie Downey, was a writer and actress. There was a divorce. Downey followed his parents from place to place, living, variously, in Forest Hills, London, Santa Monica, the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village. We discussed the word “peripatetic,” which we agreed was perfect. He likened himself to an army brat, only his father’s war was to get green-lighted, start casting. In New York and Los Angeles, Jr. was at some of the greatest parties of the 70s. It accelerated him, one incident at a time, toward knowledge, adulthood, the most famous being the night he shared a joint with his old man. He was six or seven. In this way, Downey was introduced to showbiz as the child of a mobster would be introduced to The Life.

From the start, acting was a natural thing, separated from everyday walking around by the flimsiest of curtains. He turned up in his father’s movies, first in Pound. He was five years old. He played a puppy. Then in Greaser’s Palace, a cult classic, when he was seven. When I asked Downey how he had learned his craft, he said, “Doing little one-acts at the Stage Door. Or from Mr. Jellison, the theater-arts teacher at Santa Monica High School. Or Ramon Estevez, the middle brother of Charlie and Emilio, who taught me how to tap-dance for Oklahoma. Before I came west, at middle school, Simon Baruch, East 21st and Second, we did Hair.” In this way, he came on the scene as you enter a lake—slowly, little by little, then all at once, so that, by the time he made his first big splash, he seemed at once brand-new and as if he’d been around forever. He worked for John Hughes in Weird Science and with Sarah Jessica Parker in Firstborn and Girls Just Want to Have Fun; they dated for years. He was a featured player on Saturday Night Live, part of the ill-fated 1985 cast that included Randy Quaid and Joan Cusack. He acted with Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School. But that big splash came in 1987, as the lead in Jim Toback’s The Pick-Up Artist and then as Julian, the romantic, drug-addled lost boy in the film based on Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Less than Zero. Which was tough. I mean, here was a character that millions of people had already imagined. But Downey seemed to re-write the book, replacing Ellis’s story with his own. At some point, Julian, wasted party boy, product of radical West Coast excess, morphed into Downey, spawn of Hollywood, drugs, movies, and the rest of it.

That performance defined his early career. How he exposed himself, seemed to open his life to scrutiny. This is when critics began referring to him as the most talented of his generation. A cataract of movies followed, each resulting in another chapter, another friendship, story, or lesson. He starred in 1969 with Kiefer Sutherland, who shared a house with Downey for three years, sons of the Old Guard, tearing through late-80s Hollywood. In Air America, he played opposite Mel Gibson, who remembers Downey’s manic energy, “stuff he did in the makeup chair. He’d get the newspaper and riff on the political comment and do it in rhyming couplets. That’s what his mind is like. It’s a wonder he didn’t damage it more.” They’ve remained friends in every kind of weather. In 2011, when Gibson presented Downey with a trophy at the American Cinematheque Awards, Downey talked about Gibson instead of himself, saying, “I humbly ask that you join me—unless you are completely without sin, and in which case you picked the wrong fucking industry—in forgiving my friend his trespasses, offering him the same clean slate you have me and allowing him to continue his great and ongoing contribution to our collective art without shame.”