Is Michael Pitt a bad boy with good intentions, the next Brando, or just a good guy with holes in his jeans?

Actor Michael Pitt does not live in Los Angeles. He doesn't live in Carmel. Nor does he live in Aspen or Miami Beach. He lives in New York City. But he doesn't live in the West Village, that charming haunt of well-heeled film actors. And he doesn't live where the young guns live, in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Willamsburg. Pitt lives near a large public housing block and an overpass. The closest landmark is a famous cheescake restaurant on one of the busiest avenues in downtown Brooklyn. On his apartment door, you can make out the words Tarot Readings in faded vinyl lettering. Upstairs he has a music studio, a can of Folger's, a bookshelf made of police barricades and cinder blocks, and eight busy air conditioners keeping the deadly summer heat at bay.

Pitt is no Hollywood exile. He lives far from any entertainmet hub, but he's carved out a nice career for himself, first as a cast member of TV's Dawson's Creek, then as an excitable pothead in Larry Clark's Bully and larcenous arena rocker in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. He stars this fall in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, as an American student swept up in the Paris Cinematheque riots of 1968 and lured into an incestous love triangle. He's a director's darling--Gus Van Sant's number is scrawled on his bookshelf--it's the other actors he's trying to avoid.

"Everyone's an actor out there, and everyone's playing a role," he says sitting in an overstuffed thrift-store chair. Pitt has piercing, even challenging, eyes, but his speech is halting. It trails off when he loses confidence in what he's saying. He likes to smoke, and he smokes with rhetorical flair--staring thoughtfully at the ember, blowing a hazy veil in front of his face to protect himself from a probing question. He's an actor, but none of this seems like an act. "When I go to L.A., there's all these people who I wouldn't necessarily think would be my friend if I wasn't an actor," he says. "If we lived in the same town, they would probably look down on me."

Pitt grew up a long way from Hollywood--in West Oragne, New Jersey. He ran away to New York at age 16. The circumstances of this move have been picked over by plenty of magazine writers, frankly because it's a good story. Everybody loves an Ugly Duckling. But Pitt is sick of talking about it.

"Everyone who reads shit about me says, 'Tell them something else,'" he says wearily, knowing that he's going to talk about it anyway. It's a tough story to tell. Pitt was booted from three high schools (Catholic, public, and alternative) and released on his own recognizance from a reformatory. He had his stomach pumped when he was 15, but he's not bragging about it. "I, like, OD'd on Special K," he says, grimacing. "It's pretty emarrassing, because it's a stupid drug." Pitt was a victim of being neglect that very nearly pushed him to the fringes of society. "I got labeled real young as a special case," he explains, squinting at the memory. "I was in a lot of special ed classes, and they don't really push you; they're more afraid of you. I would't go to class, and I would find a sewer somewhere and sit there and drink and write in my diary all day, and then go to last period. I though that I was crazy, that I was dumb, that I was a bum."

Pitt was 9 when he saw his first shrink, and now he claims his acting career began on that therapist's couch. "I never told my therapist the truth. Most of the time I was in therapy, I was playing a role," he says with a smirk. "Then I found out later, 'Oh, wait a minute, maybe i'm not playing a role! No one thinks this is a game! They don't know that I'm kidding.'"

Those thespian skills wouldn't come in handy until he was 18. By then, Pitt was living in New York, working for one of the city's less reputable bike messenger services ("Sometimes i'd get a paper bag that just said, 'John', corner of something and something'"). His Off-Broadway debut came in 1999, when he was cast in The Trestle at Pople Lick Creek at the New York Theater Workshop. On the strength of that performace he got the call from the WB. The upstart actor was still deep in his gutter-punk phase when he touched down in Wilmington, North Carolina, to begin filming Dawson's Creek.

"Literally six to nine months prior, I was kind of homeless," he recalls. "All of a sudden I'm having these big dinners with producers and TV stars. My first meal I didn't know what to order, so they ordered for me. I got a big steak. I ate it and I looked up, and no one had gotten two bites in. Later I realized that eating was a social thing; it wasn't to fill your stomach. I think I ended up eating the rest of Michelle Williams' food."

The WB crowd assumed Pitt was one of them--a born entertainer, a kid who earned his SAG card when he was still wearing onesies. And he was too scared to tell them otherwise. "I lied a lot about my past," he says. "I was ashamed of it. I told people I talked to my parents, that we had a great relationship, that I was in school. I lied about my social class." His fear was justified: Hollywood loves a bad boy, as long as the boy minds his manners offscreen. "After you make it," Pitt explains, "people are like, 'Oh, you had that upbringing,' and they think that's cool. But when you're trying to make it, people don't think it's cool. They thing you're scum. And then after, you get all these peopole who are fascinated with it."

This is why Pitt is reluctant to tell his story. Plenty of young actor would kill to have Pitt's rough-and-tumble back story. but for Pitt, it's threatening to overshadow what he's all about: acting. At one point in the interview, he asks me not to "screw him" when I go home to write this profile. I'm not sure what he means, so he tells me about the magazine reporter who was so enthralled by the juvie persona that he overlooked Pitt altogether.

"He was just hip--fucking hip and not honest," he says. "He just wanted to buy the persona. I think he gave what the people who pick up that magazine want to hear: That I'm some rebel who doesn't give a fuck about anything. I know I can be perceived as that, but I'm not just that. I do look to challenge things, but for a reason--not just for the sake of kicking over someone's sandcastle."

The kid can definitely tear shit up. His acting comes across as a reflex, a tic. He's always threatening to trip across the line from performance to reality. In Bully, Pitt makes and unlikely character--a murderous stoner named Donny- all too credible. Donny kills without any obvious justification but boredom, and Pitt makes boredom seem like the deadliest motive of all. If his acting seems untutored and chaotic, that's by design. Pitt loves it when a scene gets away from him. "That's when it's good. It's always better when you don't lie," he says. "It happened when I was killing [Bobby, Nick Stahl's character in Bully]. We had a collapsible knife, but it was metal and it stuck, so I ended up cutting Nick on the back of the neck. And I felt so fucking bad about it. But he was cool--he's like, 'Naw, it's good, it's good.' After we finished filming, the crew wasn't even looking at me--they were scared of me."

Pitt brought his appetite for destruction to the set of The Dreamers. The film's historical backdrop is the closing of the famed Cinematheque by the French government in 1968 and the student protests that accompanied it. And the riot scenes in the film were, indeed, riotous. "People got violent, but. But I liked it because it's easier as an actor: You have to act less; you just react," he says. "I wanted to do more takes and more takes, because every time they would do it, it woud get bigger and bigger."

Even before screenings were made available to the press, The Dreamers drew comparisons to another Bertolucci meditation on sex and frustration in the City of Light: Last Tango In Paris. Two biographies of Marlon Brando stand side by side on the makeshift bookshelf behind Pitt's head. I'm tempted to draw comparisionns, but he cuts me off. "They're gifts," he says dismissively. "I have people I respect, but I don't hold them up so high, because when people hold me up so high it's fucking ridiculous." Likewise, when Pitt signed on to The Dreamers, he tried hard to ignore the Bertolucci hype. "I purposely didn't educate myself about Bernardo, because I didn't want to revere him. If I really like the person, I overcompensate. I don't want them to think I'm kissing their ass, and I wind up being a dick."

Now, in the supercooled privacy of his aparmennt, drinking his Folger's, Pitt doesn't seem like anyone you'd want to revere. Respect, maybe. He's had a diffucult ride--from special-ed dropout to indie idol. Our interview is almost over, and Pitt's visibly nervous. He doesn't want this to be another bad-boy piece--he doesn't want me to think that's all he is, that his juvie past, his bookshelf made out of police barricades, and his thrift-store threads are all part of some image. I'm nervous, too. This guy lied to his therapist; how much should I believe? Then the conversation takes an awkward detour toward fashion, and I'm convinced he's the genuine article.

"I hate when I go to a photo shoot and they go, 'I really like your style,'" he says. "What's my style? I don't buy anything. If I have a hole in my jeans, I pin them up. And then you say, 'Yeah, that looks nice. It has history." But that derives out of necessity, not out of who's going to look at me when I walk down the street." Pitt puts out his cigarette. "I had a suit jacket with me that they gave me in The Dreamers. And there's rips in the elbows. And there like, 'I love the rips in the elbows! How did you think of that?' I'm like, 'The jacket's too small for me. The elbows ripped out of it."