Michael Pitt has a greasy black smear across his cheek and days-old dirty-blond stubble. His tattered T-shirt isn’t distressed so much as destroyed. It’s just past noon, and the 25-year-old actor is at his band’s Brooklyn practice space, holding a crusty bottle of Kahlúa. He takes a swig, screws his face up, then takes another. He’s got a borderline-homeless vibe that suits his current incarnation — scruffy frontman of art-punk band Pagoda — far better than his more famous incarnation — doe-eyed darling of the Sundance set.

Pagoda, fleshed out by drummer Reece Carr, bassist Willy Paredes, and cellist Christopher Hoffman, isn’t a passing whim. Pitt says that, growing up the son of an auto mechanic in suburban New Jersey in the ’80s, he fell in love with music before his acting career took off. “Actually, first I wanted to be a painter,” he says. “Then I wanted to be a writer. Then I wanted to be a musician.” By his early teens, his musical idols were Sonic Youth and the Pixies. “I didn’t grow up in a very artistic place, though, and so I felt like a total freak.”

That outsider sense informs Pitt’s roles — such as his magnetic weirdos in Last Days and Hedwig and the Angry Inch — and Pagoda’s haunting, off-kilter music, too, in which Pitt moans and snarls about little fetuses and anthrax over dark, Nirvana-tinged riffs. It’s music that draws you in without sounding particularly hospitable.

Insistent that he’s not merely pulling a Keanu with this band, Pitt claims he has put his acting career on hold indefinitely. “This,” he says, waving a hand at the amp- and cable-strewn loft, “is where my head’s at now.” He takes another swig of Kahlúa. “Most likely it’s going to stay in that direction for a while.”

All About Us!

Recommended reading “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. It’s about how the World Bank loans third-world countries money at interest rates they can’t possibly pay back, to keep them in the third world.” (Hoffman)

Favorite band “Battles. They’re like punk-rock Kraftwerk.” (Carr)

Song on the radio we can’t stand “Who even listens to the radio, man?” (Pitt)