by Tara Thorne

With his new movie, The Dreamers, opening eyes worldwide, five other movies, an album and a novel in the works, Michael Pitt is a bonafide renaissance man, all at the ripe old age of 22.

Michael Pitt walks into the atrium at the bottom of the Park City Marriott 10 minutes after he was supposed to. "I'm late," he says. "Late night, you know?" He sits at the glass table with its giant umbrella. "Mind if I smoke?"

Pitt has been at the Sundance Film Festival for less than a day, and in that time he's reluctantly posed for paparazzi on Main Street, attended the American premiere of his latest film, The Dreamers, at which he answered oblique questions regarding his full-frontal nude scene, and played a solo acoustic guitar set at a lounge sponsored by Fred Segal, which he hoped would be a quiet thing but turned into the hippest place to be last night. Of course he's tired. Of course he's late. Of course he needs a smoke.

And he can't focus yet. As Pitt chats about the new film, opening in Halifax March 5, John Cameron Mitchell, his director and co-star in 2001's Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Pitt was Tommy Gnosis, the object of Hedwig's affection), approaches from a nearby table. He sneaks up behind Pitt and kisses him on the cheek, twice.

"What's up?" Pitt says politely but gruffly. He turns to see Mitchell's face inches from his. They laugh.

"You didn't come last night," Pitt says.

"I went to bed," Mitchell replies. "You sang, right?"

"I smashed my guitar at the end," Pitt says with a laugh both sheepish and proud.

After Mitchell returns to his own interview, Pitt shakes his head, flicks ash onto a plate. "I was like, who was that guy kissing me?" he says. "I think I handled it well."

Pitt, who spent Thanksgiving in Halifax last year while his girlfriend, Alexis Dziena, filmed the TV movie She's Too Young with Marcia Gay Harden, was discovered on the streets of New York, to where he'd run from his home in New Jersey at 15. His first big role was Henry, a love interest for Michelle Williams's Jen on Dawson's Creek. After a minor role in Finding Forrester, he played two murderers: the senseless stoner Donny in Bully, who helps his friends kill a guy he doesn't even know, and sensitive A-student Justin in the Sandra Bullock vehicle Murder by Numbers, who meticulously plans a murder with his equally smart friend (Ryan Gosling) just to see if they can get away with it.

The Dreamers could be the film to launch Pitt, 22, from indie hipster to Hollywood player, although his disdain for Hollywood players is well documented. Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, the gorgeously photographed film is set in Paris circa 1968 and stars Pitt as Matthew, a young American student who gets sucked into a hyper-sexual relationship with a pair of French siblings, Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green). He holes up with them in their parents fancy apartment where they drink a lot of wine, discuss a lot of movies and have a lot of sex.

Pitt has worked with directors who like to push buttons, like Mitchell, Gus Van Sant and Larry Clark. Bertolucci's got decades on those guys. "There's two kinds of directors: the director who has a math problem, it's two plus two and you guys gotta figure out, you know, that means four," offers Pitt. "And there's another director who, like, throws you in a house and like, sets it on fire and films it and tests your instincts."

Two separate undercurrents, both based very much in instinct, push The Dreamers along, one artistic and one political. Matthew is a cinephile who loves sitting in the front of the theatre so the images are as new as possible, and it's a good time, seeing as he's smack in the middle of the French New Wave film movement, led by Jean-Luc Godard. Bertolucci intercuts his movie with clips from the era, including Greta Garbo in Queen Christina, and re-enactments of famous scenes, like when the trio run through the Louvre, as the trio did in Godard's Band of Outsiders. They fight about who's the better genius: Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin. They quiz each other about the movies; an incorrect answer means somebody's doing something embarrassing, as when Louis must jerk off to a poster of Marlene Dietrich in front of Isabelle and Matthew.

In 1968, the French government fired Henri Langlois, who founded the Cinematheque Francais. Students protested the firing and the cinema's closure; protest soon turned into full-fledged riots raging through the city. In Bertolucci's version of that time, the riots rage in the streets below the trio's bourgeois nest, and it's not until debris comes crashing through their windows that the siblings decide to take part in the revolution. Matthew, who is non-violent, decides against it, telling Louis as students clash with police, "We're not like them. We use this," he points to his head, "not this," he holds up a fist. Louis abandons him on the street.

"I'm not a very political person only because I'm not very educated," says Pitt. "I'm very much the dumb American. I try to stay away from politics but I was very excited about the fact that the American was the pacifist. I thought for right now, for the youth of America, it would be a good thing for them to see."

Good luck to them, since they can't see the film. In the US, the film's sexual scenes, there are full-frontal nude scenes for all three actors, simulated sex and general nakedness, have landed it an NC-17 rating, meaning no one under 18 can see it. Some theatres won't show NC-17 films, some newspapers won't run ads for them. (In Canada, the film is rated R, meaning minors can see it with a guardian.) Pitt's not worried about it.

"It never kept me out," he says, laughing. "That only made it more exciting to me, do y'know? I think the good thing about it is it shows like a seriousness, it's not like a teen movie, but it's for the youth. And it requires you to be very adult, which I think a lot of the youth of America are up to, but aren't given the opportunity a lot. They're sheltered by sex and then infected with violence. It's strange."

Bernardo Bertolucci can't believe it. The Italian director, whose most famous film is 1972's Last Tango in Paris, in which a 50-ish Marlon Brando sodomizes a young Maria Schneider using butter, has long weathered the accusation his films are over-sexed. But he doesn't get it, this time.

"The two boys and the girl are very innocent," he says via satellite from London, where a chronic back injury has kept him from attending Sundance. "This is my opinion. I need to go back 30 years to a time when Last Tango in Paris never got more than 17 [rating]. For me it's very strange. How is it that in 2004 we are more puritanical than 30 years ago? Was it like that five years ago? Will it be like that in five years?"

Pitt was right, in the end: on February 6, The Dreamers debuted on five screens in the US. It made more than $142,000 its opening weekend, an astonishing average of around $28,000 per screen. The kid caper Catch That Kid, which also opened that weekend, made $5.8 million on 2,847 screens, for an average of just over $2,000.

"I'm not so worried about young people being influenced by sexuality of The Dreamers," says Bertolucci. "I'm much more worried about the minds of all these young people, not only in the States, everywhere now, being atrophied by the incredibly low and vulgar level of what they see in TV. That is worry for me. It's not sex. It's not violence. It's really the terrible constant process atrophying the brains of young people."

Pitt's doing his best to avoid wasting his brain. He's got five films in various stages of production, including a dramatization of the West Memphis Three murders, he's recording his debut album in his Brooklyn apartment and working on a novel.

"I'm usually working whether or not I'm getting paid," he says. "I'm not like a writer or well educated, you know. But I would be writing anyway. I remember when I was younger I was a fan of actors, you know, there was always so much more I wanted from them. I'd hear they were doing music and I'd want to hear their shit. And I always got excited when someone took advantage of their opportunities, because their opportunities are pretty amazing. I think I would feel guilty if I wasn't trying to do a bunch of stuff."