‘I think there’s blood on my glass.” Ryan Gosling is joking, until he looks again. A glossy redness stains the edge of the tumbler. The publicist apologises, holds up the hand she’s just cut opening the water bottle. For anyone whose world view depends on the idea of Gosling as chivalrous, the good news is this: “It really is blood?” He springs up. “Wait, are you OK?” Bandages are sought. After a few moments, we resume our interview. “Wow,” he says. “Blood spilled already. We can only go downhill.”

He hunches forward in black T-shirt and jeans. He may conceivably have had a late night. It’s easier than you might think to forget what he sounds like. In his recent films, Gosling has gone from laconic to monastic. The tone was set with Drive, the 2011 neon-lit crime drama in which he wore a white satin bomber jacket and stamped a man to death but kept his counsel about both decisions. Where other actors had words, Gosling had soulful glowers. By his last starring role in Only God Forgives, he had whittled things down to 17 lines.

Now he’s taken the logical next step and left the screen completely. In his new film Lost River, Gosling is, for the first time, the director. This spares him delivering dialogue, but at a price. On this side of the process, the director is obliged to keep talking – especially when, as Gosling is, they are also the writer and producer. And especially when the film is Lost River.

Watch a video review of Lost River from Cannes 2014 Guardian

In the US, bloodied by the critics, his debut is out in cinemas only in New York and LA; otherwise it’s going straight to video on demand. The release in Britain is more generous, and so Gosling is in London, in a nice hotel off Oxford Street, where Peter Stringfellow is having coffee in the lobby.

“I know people are surprised I’ve made it,” Gosling says. “But it’s the movie I wanted to make.”

The film is set in the post-industrial township of the title, a loosely fictional stand-in for Detroit, where it was shot. Among the tumbledown houses, a single mother called Billy (Christina Hendricks) scrapes by with her two sons, one a toddler, the other a young man named Bones (Iain De Caestecker). There is a turf war about scavenged copper, a Grand Guignol burlesque nightclub. There is mutilation, lust, a fairytale mood, all manner of visual hi-jinks. To call Lost River a crazed pop-gothic phantasmagoria is just how it is – like saying Jaws is about a shark.

Gosling on the set of Lost River

There have been other descriptions. Almost a year ago, the film had its world premiere at Cannes. Within two hours it was a disaster, engulfed by a monster wave of terrible reviews. It was, apparently, ridiculous – a grand folly, stewed in ripped-off imagery and its own self-importance. You could make quite a poster with the quotes. (Variety: “A howler.”)

At the mention of this, Gosling does not scowl or pout. He listens attentively then gives a small, neat nod at the point you finish speaking. “We had an incredible night,” he says. “The screening was a great experience. I’ve read people were booing. It’s just not true. That narrative has been distorted.” But the critical response? “Right. That was what it was.”

Maybe it was always going to be this way. Following his 2001 breakthrough as a Jewish neo-Nazi in The Believer, Gosling enjoyed a decade of smooth ascent. He was seen as very talented; a fireball of charisma. There were comparisons with Steve McQueen. His ludicrous good looks made him an internet meme. (He is baffled by the “Hey Girl” phenomenon; he says he never used the phrase.) Gosling at the time of Drive was the essence of movie star. You loved him, I loved him. He had also reached the most treacherous point in an actor’s career, where just turning up can look self-parodic: the perfect moment for a backlash.

Gosling and Refn talk Drive on the beach at Cannes in 2011 Guardian

The sensible first film to make as a director might have been a modest slice of downbeat social realism. Instead, Lost River has Ben Mendelsohn performing a dervish sex boogie and Gosling’s real-life partner Eva Mendes awash in a slick of stage blood. (Off-screen, the couple recently had a daughter, Esmeralda.) Further dissonance comes with the casting of Matt Smith as psychotic local hoodlum Bully, the former Doctor Who cruising Detroit’s ruins in a motorised armchair demanding we “look at my muscles”.

And so came Gosling’s Icarus moment. At the screening I went to, just his name in the credits caused a snigger behind me. The only complication is that the film is fascinating. It’s true it has the tang of other film-makers, not least David Lynch and Nicolas Winding Refn, director of Drive and Only God Forgives. But in a movie filled with vivid performances (none of which happened by accident), some of the most potent sights come straight from Gosling. And some, like the fetishistic moulded plastic “shell” women at the club are paid to be locked into, carry troubling weight. Life would be simpler if Lost River was as shallow as they say. It may not be.

On the night of our interview, I also see him in an onstage Q&A with Smith at the Curzon Soho, the arthouse cinema in London. He has to come in through the back. The day before in Paris, he was mobbed by fans. When he’s not in the room, conversations often concern security arrangements. It’s not just paparazzi – around the corner from the Curzon, a woman in a Drive T-shirt appears to be sending a male companion into restaurants to look for him. “Oh God, I think I can see him!” I hear her say.

Matt Smith and Ryan Gosling at the Apple store, London, 8 April. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen//REX Shutterstock

Inside the cinema, Gosling and Smith enter to warm applause from an audience fresh from the film. Some of the crowd bought £50 Curzon memberships just to be able to get a ticket. He explains how the idea for the film took hold when he was in Detroit making political thriller The Ides of March. The place had always fascinated him, the home of Motown and the auto industry. Having found the modern reality was “40 miles of abandoned neighbourhoods,” he bought a camera and began to shoot. A story started percolating.

His dynamic with Smith is sweetly pally. He says he cast him after seeing him screaming at aliens in Doctor Who. “And I don’t think the aliens were even real.” Smith’s gentle raffishness seems to take the pressure off. Gosling smiles a lot. At the mention of critics, he feigns surprise: “It’s divisive?”

At first, it seems odd that he would have cast in this orgy of Americana one actor from Glasgow (De Caestecker), another from Northampton (Smith), and in Saoirse Ronan and Mendelsohn, an Irishwoman and an Australian. But then Gosling isn’t American but Canadian – raised in Cornwall, Ontario.

A video review of the re-edited Lost River Guardian

The town lies across a bridge from the US border. As a child, he had a crush on the country just out of reach, its movies, music, its promise of a “middle-class life”. His own was a “struggle”. The cute story about Gosling as a boy is that he adopted Marlon Brando’s accent on deciding his own wasn’t tough enough. Less cute is that he was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, prescribed Ritalin, and couldn’t read until he was 10. Is he in touch with anyone from that time? A childhood friend? “I didn’t really have friends back then. It was a tight little family unit. We rolled with each other.” He made a friend, he says, when he was 15.

By then, famously, he had spent two years in Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club, having uncovered a gift for performance. His TV appearances with Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears are available on YouTube. It’s freaky how much he looks like a smaller, unstubbled version of his adult self, scampishly singing Jodeci’s Cry For You. “I had my hustle. It was whatever I could do to not end up working in a factory. If I had to shake it like a showgirl, I was going to do it.”

If the money problems that haunt Lost River feel a long way from Gosling’s Hollywood life, they’re not so far from his old one. Cornwall was a town built on a paper mill, that one operation employing most of his family. When he was a boy, the business collapsed. What awaited, he says, was: “Disarray. Disaster.”

Gosling on the set of Lost River. Photograph: Kim Simms/PR

One accusation often levelled at Lost River has been style over substance, that behind its cavalcade of cool stuff to look at lies nothing more. The stranger thought might be that, through the ceaseless ta-da of its aesthetic, this is raw autobiography – a film star showing us the inside of his head.

Gosling’s parents divorced when he was 13. Watching Lost River, he says, he sees “a visualisation of my emotions at that time. Everything demolished.”

I tell him when I watch it, I see a film about a single mother. “Well, the environment in Detroit can be threatening and ominous, and it reminded me of a feeling I had when I was a kid. Because my mother wasn’t just a single mother, she was also very beautiful. And men were like wolves. Just walking down the street with her was scary. There was a predatory vibe. Guys would whistle, or they’d circle in their cars ...” He was angry, but mostly terrified. “You want to protect your family, but you feel weak and helpless. And it ignites your imagination, because you start to picture scenarios in which you could defend her.”

Gosling with his partner, Eva Mendes, March 2013. Photograph: Startraks Photo/REX

His mother, Donna, has seen the film. “She liked it, I think.” She was “involved in the process,” visiting him in Detroit. (In high spirits at the Curzon, he will expand on her opinion: “She thinks I could be funnier.”)

How about his father? A voice cuts in behind me: “Can we stick to film questions?” The publicist, I realise, is sitting there, bandaged. Gosling looks a little awkward. “Yeah ... he wasn’t so involved.”

Winding Refn has been a longtime mentor. Making the caustic 2010 romance Blue Valentine, Gosling was noted to have grown to physically resemble its director, Derek Cianfrance. Now in Lost River, De Caestecker is a dead ringer for the Gosling of 10 years ago. “I’ve heard that. I never thought about it. He was just the right man for the job.” All the same, Gosling talks about the film as a ramshackle thing made by friends – an almost family. He and Mendes spent the wardrobe budget at the Salvation Army, returning with bin bags from which the cast were invited to choose a costume.

The result ending up at Cannes still troubles him. “A lot of people worked very hard on the film, and it was a chance to showcase their work ...” He frowns. “But this movie was basically homemade. And to be there in tuxedos ... it felt incongruous.”

By then the movie didn’t just belong to Gosling. It was also the property of Warner Brothers, the American rights bought for $3m when the film was unfinished. After Cannes, the studio tried selling them.

Gosling promotes Lost River in Cannes with his stars, May 2014. Photograph: BERTRAND LANGLOIS/AFP/Getty Images

He mentions a scene shot in the derelict theatre where the Stooges played their first concert. It’s about to be pulled down, he says, and the same has happened to the project where the Supremes were formed. He is set to do another Q&A in Brixton. I tell him he should look around before that part of London is transformed too; his eyes light up, but I don’t see how he could do it without panicking his security man. He discusses his love for Night of the Hunter, the unclassifiable 1955 masterpiece made by the actor Charles Laughton, received so poorly at the time he never directed another film.

“I can’t wait to do it again,” he says when I ask if the same goes for him. “I’m champing at the bit to do it again.”