Robert Downey Jr. from Brat to Icon: Essays on the Film Career

Robert Downey Jr. may be best known as Iron Man, but his career as an actor stretches back to the 1970s 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 collection of new essays examines, in roughly chronological order, more than 25 of Downey's best performances in films as diverse as Less...