Tommy the Alien Joins the Dark Side

With his hair long and approaching that iconic bob, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is back to looking like he did during the first seasons of Third Rock from the Sun nearly 10 years ago. That's putting a little bit of a crimp in the 24-year-old's leading-man status, but while there's not much he can do about his baby face, he's doing everything else in his power to put his days as a cute, sunny child actor behind him.

The start of that campaign is the sexually explicit independent film Mysterious Skin, in which Gordon-Levitt plays a gay teenage hustler who was abused by his Little League coach long ago. Lean, muscled and with his hair cropped close, he is almost unidentifiable as that kid from Angels in the Outfield.

After Mysterious Skin comes Brick, a sardonic drama coming out later in 2005 where his character breaks into a high school mafialike clique in order to rescue his ex-girlfriend. Cloaked in a trench coat and speaking in a highly stylized noir-thriller manner, he's as far from the patter of Tommy the alien as he can get. The two films premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January as kind of a double feature of Gordon-Levitt's dark new mood.