CITIZEN PENN.(Sean Penn)(Interview)

In San Francisco one day last June, at 7:45 A.M., an hour when even the panhandlers on Geary Street were still asleep, Sean Penn was standing in front of me, in sneakers, gray chinos, and denim work shirt, the quiff of his full brown hair catching glints of sun, alert and ready to go. "I'm not so much an early riser as a non-sleeper," he said, peering over the top of his sunglasses. The day before, Penn had flown back from Tehran--where, as a correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle, he had been covering the run-up to the Iranian elections--in order to attend the junior-high-school graduation of his fourteen-year-old daughter, Dylan. This morning, he had dropped his twelve-year-old son, Hopper, at school. Now we headed off to Union Square, for some of Sears Fine Food's Swedish pancakes.

Penn, who is forty-five and a compact five feet eight, is at ease in his body. There is nothing hunched or furtive in his bearing--he emanates what in earlier times would have been called "backbone." "The feeling you get about him is that you can't call his bluff, because he's not bluffing," Woody Allen said about Penn, who starred in his 1999 film "Sweet and Lowdown." At the same time, Penn has a very specific gravity: reserve is part of his strength and his seduction. He is warm but no hail-fellow, polite but without that come-hither thing. "You see me from ten feet away, everyone thinks I'm gonna bite or something," Penn said. On first meeting, he gave no semaphore of greeting--no handshake, no smile, no small talk. His presence was his hello.

Over breakfast, he handed me an Iranian candy. He was preparing to write an article about his trip. (The piece, which was twelve thousand words, ran in the Chronicle in five installments in August.) He had a tantalizing array of incidents from which to draw: he had attended prayers at a Tehran mosque, a women's-rights demonstration, meetings with dissidents, a photo op with former President (and then Presidential candidate) Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and, perhaps inevitably, an award ceremony for his acting, at the Film Museum of Iran. On his travels, he told me, he had been "very aware of the ugly American," particularly in the reportorial ranks. "There's a consistent insensitivity," he said. "I watched journalists. They could only ever be seen by their subject as the person with a deadline. It's 'breaking news,' literally. By the time you get the news, you've broken it. You don't get a chance to investigate stories. These journalists live half the time in the Internet cafe, filing a story." Penn described his own form of reportage as "tournalism." "It's not an obligation of the tourist to observe experience so much as to have it," he said. "For me, a greater accuracy of perception comes out of that."

A veteran of some thirty-five films, Penn is renowned, in the acting profession, for the meticulousness of his research. "Sean is a guy who doesn't want to analyze a character too much," Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who directed Penn in "21 Grams" (2003), has said. "He wants to be as the character." For his portrait of the stoned surfer Jeff Spicoli, in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (1982)--the role that made him famous, at the age of twenty-two--Penn lived out of his car at the beach; to play a cop, in "Colors" (1988), he apprenticed to an L.A.P.D. officer; for the role of Emmet Ray, "the world's second-greatest guitar player," in "Sweet and Lowdown," he studied guitar fingering. In his forays into politics and journalism, Penn relies on the same strategy. "Sean's an investigative reporter of his emotional life and our world," Dennis Hopper, who directed Penn in "Colors," told me. "Sean goes to the middle of the hurricane. He's not taking a secondhand opinion. He really wants to know what's going down." In 1992, during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, Penn drove into the thick of the pandemonium and got a shopping cart thrown through his windshield for his curiosity. In 2002 and 2003, he travelled to Iraq (once before the American-led invasion and once afterward), in order to observe life there--and, on the second visit, to write about it for the Chronicle. "My trip is to personally record the human face of the Iraqi people so that their blood--along with that of American soldiers--would not be invisible on my own hands," he said at a Baghdad press conference in 2002. In Penn's opinion, his shift from actor to correspondent was "seamless." "You wake up in the morning with an interest in listening and expressing," he said. "It all feels the same to me. Acting is Everyman-ness, and loving Everyman. Finally, you're reaching out to people's pain."

Because of his activism, Penn is often caricatured as a showboating celebrity liberal. "It's as if Ernest Hemingway made sweet, sweet love to Jeff Spicoli before our very eyes," the media blog Gawker said when the second installment of the Iran piece came out. In "Team America: World Police," Trey Parker and Matt Stone's 2004 marionette film parody of Bush's war on terror, a bubbleheaded Penn puppet says of Iraq, "Before Team America showed up it was a happy place. They had flowing meadows, and rainbow skies, and rivers made of chocolate where the children danced and laughed and played with gumdrop smiles." Penn shot back a "sincere fuck you" to the filmmakers, in a letter that was reprinted on the Drudge Report; he also offered to retrace his steps with them. "We'll fly to Amman, Jordan, and I'll ride with you . . . twelve hours through the Sunni Triangle into Fallujah and Baghdad and I'll show you around," he wrote. "When we return, make all the fun you want."

Early in 2005, Penn completed filming for Steven Zaillian's remake of "All the King's Men," which will open later this year, and in which he plays the mesmerizing and corrupt Louisiana kingpin Willie Stark, Robert Penn Warren's fictional version of Huey Long. His plan now, he told me, was to take a couple of years off from acting. (This wouldn't be the first time that he had taken a break from performing. In the nineties, he quit for a few years, and threw himself into directing instead.) "I'm out of fuel," he said, adding, "You want to be aware of the impact in terms of just how much you put out there. You want to maintain the potency of aspects of yourself--marshal your forces, select things you can put your heart and soul into. Have time to evolve and re-inform the creature who's doing it." He said that he sometimes has difficulty sustaining his passion over the hard slog of a film shoot. "You turn on the news, and there's something else you want to make a movie about," he said. On the other hand, he added, "if there's anything really valuable for me in the craft of acting, it's maintaining the skills to hold on to the passion I started with." Acting, he explained, was like parachuting. "If you jump out of an airplane, you love the first thousand feet. Now you're ready to land, but you're not gonna slow down just because you aren't interested anymore. The craft is there to make sure that when you jump you're propelled properly to keep going full speed."

Penn is an entrepreneur of his own edge--a roiling combination of rage, buoyancy, tenderness, and hurt. His struggle to contain this combustible emotional package makes him at once dangerous and exciting. In his art and in his life, he takes chances. ("Sean is batty as a loon and is prone to taking extraordinary risks in foreign towns," the late Hunter S. Thompson, who knew something about recklessness, wrote.) He has been known to hand out to friends cards on which he has printed the epigraph to William Saroyan's "The Time of Your Life": "In the time of your life live," it begins, "so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches." Penn has the confidence of a man who believes that the world will provide what he needs when he needs it. "It's trusting your instincts and your experience," he says. "Call it fate."