John Cusack says of his new movie, Grosse Pointe Blank: "There's something delicious about going back to high school." The onetime prince of the 1980s teen-flick is once again strolling into a school gymnasium, but this time it is decked out for the 10-year reunion for the high-school alumni of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, USA and Cusack is playing one Martin Q. Blank, a hitman in the grip of a nostalgia-induced identity crisis.
Cusack sees this film as a blackly comic allegory of the workings of America's modern corporate society. "It's about the way the American dream is mythologised. I saw Martin Blank as a metaphor for a certain kind of cut-throat ruthlessness. And I just loved the idea of doing it in Grosse Pointe - it's just outside Detroit and at one time it was the Cadillac capital of the world. Now, like all those industrial belt places, the area has virtually closed down: this engine of the American dream is now a desolate place with the ghosts of the idle rich still hanging around.
"I actually went to a school reunion while we were writing the script. I was more nervous going into that place than doing the movie at all. We ended up rewriting the entire reunion sequence. There were all these jocks who, 10 years later, were well into their compound addiction; and career girls versus the family women. Those chicks were really vicious to each other. Just bizarre."
Blessed with all the ingredients of an instant classic - it is funny, violent, and hopelessly romantic - Grosse Pointe Blank has already brought Cusack the same kind of attention that other independently-minded actor-vehicles, Big Night and Trees Lounge, did for Stanley Tucci and Steve Buscemi. With a co-writer and a co-producer credit, as well as taking the lead role, Grosse Pointe Blank has become the 31-year-old Cusack's declaration of identity - an identity that has remained curiously marginal in spite of many slobbered-over performances in a string of loyalty-inspiring movies.
It is a perfect act of movie therapy. The friends and-family elements of the production set-up only reinforces the cosy atmosphere of homecoming. Cusack's sister Joan - herself an accomplished actress and an Oscar nominee for her gum-chewing sister role in Working Girl - was drafted in to play the substantial role of Blank's secretary; siblings Ann and Bill also got smaller parts. What is more, Cusack's band of acting buddies from the Chicago-based New Crime Theatre Company (which Cusack began bankrolling immediately after becoming a star in 1985 with Reiner's The Sure Thing) supplies much of the writing and acting talent.
It is the invitation to watch him grow up that makes Cusack rare among modern actors. As if designed to harmonise with his own adolescence, the tortured love-struck teenagers he played - as a teenager - in The Sure Thing and Say Anything . . . gave way to the uncertain, anxious strugglers of The Grifters and Bullets Over Broadway.
"If you look at them in a certain way," says Cusack, "you can see things that I am trying to process and express in my movies. It's definitely true to say that when I got into my twenties I wanted to explore the darker sides of myself - I didn't want to just do comedies. If the actor does a good job, you should see a duality: a part of the person in there alongside the character.
"The Grifters, particularly, is all about that: what's behind the mask, how you enter into the trust between people." In Grosse Pointe Blank, it is possible to sense that, as Martin Blank, Cusack has reached the other side. Stephen Frears, the British director who worked with Cusack on The Grifters, confirms this. "I met him a few months ago and he'd changed enormously. He looked so at ease with himself. Just as The Grifters caught him at a moment of transition, so I suspect he's coming into his own with Grosse Pointe Blank. The way things work for actors is that they have to be lucky. They need to find a part that fits them for what they are at a particular age."
That privilege came early for Cusack, who displayed an effortless ability to encapsulate the spiritual and emotional agonies of the mid-1980s American teenager. The Sure Thing, Reiner's coast-to-coast yearn-athon, was the opening instalment in what became a trilogy of brilliant teen-movies. Savage Steve Holland's Better Off Dead, in which Cusack dons skis to revenge himself on the traditional jock bad-guy, has won fanatical devotion for its weird mix of teenage satire and dopey animation.
And then came the movie Say Anything . . ., the directorial debut of Crowe, a music journalist whose undercover schoolroom assignments had already dragged teenage classic Fast Times At Ridgemont High kicking and screaming into existence. In Say Anything . . . Crowe and Cusack together summed up the moment when an entire generation asserted its right to have its feelings taken seriously.
Crowe, with the success of Jerry Maguire behind him, remains forthright in his admiration: "I think he brought strength and nobility to the part of the love-struck romantic. You see it done often so wimpily; but with Cusack you get the pain and the anger and the frustration, and the love." Cusack's Lloyd Dobler, his soul seemingly flooded with uncontrollable emotion, attempts to prove his undying love for the girl who rejected him (played by Ione Skye) by holding aloft a cassette player roaring out Peter Gabriel's In Your Eyes.
"I have to credit John a lot for that scene," Crowe says. "He was worried that it would come off as silly - and simply not effective. What he brought to it was the pain of rejection. He said: `If I'm going to do this, I'm going to be angry and defiant', and what he brought to that moment is the reason we're talking about it now, I guess. You see it all in his face, and there's even a little bit of the actor John Cusack in there - annoyed at having to do the scene at all."
The signs were there, however, as the decade neared its close, that Cusack was unhappy with the teen-king tag. ("I knew before I cast Say Any- thing . . . that he didn't want to do movies set in high school any more," Crowe says.) His first significant break-out role predated Crowe's movie, when he was cast as White Sox third-baseman, Buck Weaver, in Eight Men Out, John Sayles's account of the 1919 World Series scandal.
Cusack's brush with Sayles's brand of incendiary, politically-inflected film-making proved decisive. The Cusack family prides itself on its strong left-liberal sympathies, and John later claimed that a perusal of the writing of radical linguist Noam Chomsky opened his eyes ("When I was 17, Joanie was going out with some anarchist from Wisconsin who gave me The Chomsky Reader - the most important thing I've ever read").
Cusack also credits Sayles for educating him about the power-plays at work in film-making: "He taught me there are really three drafts to a movie - the script, the shoot, the editing. Movies can get screwed up in any of those three places."
Cusack turned his back on the teen genre, and struck out for more adult roles. The Grifters, in which he played Jim Thompson's wheedling con-artist Roy Dillon, was the obvious turning point. Frears recalls: "I didn't know a thing about him at the time. I got a call from my casting agent, who just said `I've got the boy you want'. He came in, we had a chat, I knew he would be great.
"While we were filming, he used to come up to me and say: `I'm relieved you never saw any of the films I made before'. Afterwards it was explained to me who he was; but at the time I just saw somebody who was young and rather talented. The film must have come along at exactly the right time for him: he was clearly intellectually ambitious, and wanted to do serious work, stimulating work. It used to make him laugh that I knew so little about him."
In his quest to prove himself, Cusack uncannily reflected the masochistic struggles of his grifter character, who is attempting to escape the domination of his racetrack-fixer mother. To Cusack, moreover, the movie fitted in with his new-found ideological purpose. "The Grifters is undoubtedly a political film," he explains. "These people are criminals, but the story shows you why they do what they do, as well as the psychological constructs that get built from early on that make people behave in certain ways. It has a humanist perspective, I guess."
Hailed as his breakthrough movie, The Grifters laid Cusack's wild years to rest. He was praised for his effortless combination of cynicism and vulnerability but, in what is become something of a tradition, his co-stars - Anjelica Huston and Annette Bening - earned the Oscar nominations. Five years later it happened again, after Cusack's role in another "breakthrough" movie, Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway. He got to play the Allen-surrogate: David Shayne, an earnest playwright, whose talents run considerably shorter than his ambitions.
"It was a great honour," Cusack says now, "but it was horrifying at the same time. It was a great character, all hot air and grand expectations, but if you tried to do Woody Allen you were doomed: there was no way you could do it better than him. I had to try to make it my own." Cusack's perfectly judged performance - switching between flaming-eyed earnestness and helpless compromise - ensured that Bullets Over Broadway is far and away the best of Allen's recent work. True to form, though, it was supporting players Chazz Palminteri, Dianne Wiest and Jennifer Tilly who received the nods at Oscar time.
Otherwise, before Grosse Pointe Blank, Cusack never found a true attention-grabber. His first Allen film, Shadows And Fog, got lost in the media frenzy that followed the director's separation from Mia Farrow. Other films - City Hall, True Colors, Fat Man And Little Boy - appeared to answer Cusack's desire to take a swipe at the American establishment and work with legends (Al Pacino, Paul Newman), but did little to endear him to the paying public. Minor parts in Vincent Ward's Map Of The Human Heart and Alan Parker's The Road To Wellville created further confusion in the rigidly hierarchical Hollywood system.
Recently, however, Cusack swallowed a little pride and climbed on board Con Air, the Jerry Bruckheimer action extravaganza with a starry cast - for what only a few years previously was considered the dumbest of movie genres. "I knew that Jerry Bruckheimer was a wildly successful producer, and the script had an interesting kind of gallows humour to it. I thought: `I've been acting for 10 years; I'd better get a $100 million movie under my belt'. I'd turned down a lot of action movies, but I thought: `What the hell, I'll do one'. It seemed like a good popcorn movie, and I thought it would help my career with the studios."
Whatever complicated motivations inform his career strategy, there is little doubt that Cusack likes to act. That is why, of all his teen-movie peers, he is the only one who has developed into a genuine dramatic performer. A few, such as Tom Cruise and Demi Moore, have metamorphosed into A-list habitues; most, such as Rob Lowe, Molly Ringwald or Charlie Sheen, have more or less fallen by the wayside. (Only Matthew Broderick, Ferris Bueller himself, has maintained relatively even keel.) Cusack thinks this is because "I was always in it for the long haul. I wanted a career that lasted for 50 years. I can't get excited unless there's a script with merit there. I just don't want to be a mercenary."