Robert Downey, Jr., from Brat to Icon

Robert Downey, Jr., may be best known as Iron Man, but his career as an actor stretches back to the 1980s and features several Oscar-quality roles. He has worked with a wide range of innovative directors from Oliver Stone and Robert Altman to Richard Linklater and Shane Black, and has played punk kids, detectives, journalists and even a serial killer.

This fascinating collection of essays combines scholarly attention to detail with a highly readable style to examine, in roughly chronological order, more than 25 of Downey's best performances in films as diverse as Less Than Zero, Chaplin, Natural Born Killers, A Scanner Darkly, The Soloist and Tropic Thunder. Including a biography, chronology and filmography, the book highlights the inseparability of the actor's biography from his works and from the unique combination of talents he brings to his roles.