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"\n\n With Crazy, Stupid, Love, Ryan Gosling takes a big leap at Hollywood stardom. He\u2019s also the best-dressed young actor on the planet, handsome, and charming. Is he a perfect famous person? And what does that even mean?\n\n It doesn\u2019t seem like Ryan Gosling wants it. Not all of it, anyway. And yet, starting Friday with Crazy, Stupid, Love, a romantic comedy that actually seems to have men and women alike intrigued, Gosling appears to be taking the big dive into the deep end of stardom. It wasn\u2019t always preordained for Gosling, this punched ticket, though it probably should have been. The former &amp;quot;Mickey Mouse Club&amp;quot; star was a member of the much-ballyhooed Britney Spears/Christina Aguilera/Justin Timberlake class, the product of a place you have never heard of called Cornwall, Ontario, and a high school dropout survivor of Canadian episodic television. He lunged at this pi&amp;amp;#xF1;ata seven years ago. That\u2019s when he grabbed the lead, and the hearts of many a sentimentalist, with The Notebook, a saccharine Nicholas Sparks adaptation that still inspires kissing-in-the-rain mimicry the world over. Back then, Gosling was a brooder, coming off the Sundance darling The Believer, where he played a Jewish neo-Nazi (edgy!), the twisty but schlocky high school whodunit Murder by Numbers (after which he dated co-star Sandra Bullock, 16 years his senior), and a long-forgotten melodrama called The United States of Leland (he was Leland, an incarcerated martyr). All fine performances\u2014wry and elusive in places, bitterly torn up in others. He was one to watch, a trendy Futures pick.\n\n Then came that kiss. &amp;quot;It still isn\u2019t over!&amp;quot; And yet, it was over right away. In the ensuing years, Gosling, a muttery, mumbling performer with an affected urban drawl, made some curious choices. Stay, a lousy sci-fi head trip; Half Nelson, a brutally interior portrait of an addict teacher for which he was nominated for an Oscar (with no shot at winning); a laughably overblown legal thriller called Fracture (Ring a bell? No?). Half Nelson helped with the cred, but few saw it. In 2007, he starred as the titular hero of Lars and the Real Girl, a thoughtful, brave, and ultimately aimless story of a broken-down weirdo who falls in love with a sex doll. With each he begged Hollywood to avoid him. I am not interested in your superheroes and your blockbusters and your heartthrob identity. I am not bankable, he seemed to gurgle in that backwoods-by-way-of-Brooklyn purr. He was a searcher and an act-or. And a musician, too, in the strange but sort of compelling band Dead Man\u2019s Bones. The coup de gr&amp;amp;#xE2;ce, seemingly, came in the form of last year\u2019s Blue Valentine, a deeply fucked-up and honest portrayal of love, marriage, and family gone bad. It\u2019s a great movie that scrapes your guts out. But not exactly the sort of thing you\u2019d watch more than once. And definitely not a moneymaker. Despite a mild NC-17 outrage, an Oscar nod for costar Michelle Williams, and this lock-stock classic scene, Blue Valentine made only $12 million at the box office. A decade as a working Hollywood film actor and all Ryan Gosling had to show for it was character actor cred obfuscating his leading man good looks.\n\n Suddenly, all that feels like a long time ago. Now, the Age of Gosling seems imminent if not inevitable. Here he is on Letterman, dressed like a time-lost man of great style in a brown Gucci suit. Shades of Michael Caine, certainly, with an unshaven, unfussy twist. It\u2019s no mistake the guy\u2019s been all over our Week in Style roundups for the past few weeks, either, pulling off sockless loafers, short-sleeved cardigans, and Persol shades with ease. Whether stylist-enhanced or not, Gosling looks like the star many had tabbed him in the afterglow of The Notebook.\n\n Tailored clothes are just the start. He\u2019s also saying the right things, kicking it with Dave about that time Peter O\u2019Toole hit on his sister\u2014bemused but also respectful of his forebearers!\u2014or gassing with Jimmy Fallon about the myth of the Turkish bathhouse (we feel you on that, bro). He was even a good enough sport to play &amp;quot;Hey girl...&amp;quot; with MTV, where he had the good sense to giggle his way through the proceedings. Just yesterday, Gosling, now 30, told Slate, &amp;quot;I don\u2019t know enough about manliness to define it. I\u2019m not an authority on it. My character [in Crazy, Stupid, Love] seems to think that he is, so he would define it. I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m talking about.&amp;quot; Charming self-effacement is also a righteous path. Most men have no idea how to define their own masculinity. Gosling\u2019s version of Alpha Male Movie Star can\u2019t replicate Cary Grant or James Dean or Robert Redford or George Clooney or any other leading man that came before him. The Internet has ruined all of that. Last year, he told W magazine about his infamously slurry speech: &amp;quot;As a kid I decided that having a Canadian accent doesn\u2019t sound tough. I thought guys should sound like Marlon Brando. So now I have a phony accent that I can\u2019t shake, so it\u2019s not phony anymore.&amp;quot; That\u2019s on the Internet forever! Most people didn\u2019t know Cary Grant\u2019s real name was Archibald Leach until after he died.\n\n Now, we know too much about a star like Gosling, have watched him slip too many times\u2014seriously, watch Stay\u2014to consider the possibility of Perfect Celebrity. But he might get close. After Crazy, Stupid, Love, Gosling stars as Driver, the unnamed protagonist of Nicolas Winding Refn\u2019s Drive, a genre flick about a stunt driver who does double duty as a getaway driver for the mob. It has just about the most core-throttling trailer on the planet and more buzz than a hornet\u2019s nest full of iPhones. And after that, a return to prestige with The Ides of March, a fictionalized account of Howard Dean\u2019s 2004 presidential campaign, seen through the eyes of a young Communications Director. Only this time a lot people will actually see the movie, because, well, George Clooney wrote, directed, and stars in it and it\u2019s got Oscar Bait stamped on its neck. Comedy. Action. Drama. The trifecta.\n\n It all hinges on expectation, before we\u2019ve seen any of these movies, before fate can take it all back. But Gosling, by excreting his artistic enzymes early, taking his lumps, and finally going for whatever version of the gusto comes with romancing Emma Stone while not wearing a shirt, just may redefine how our modern movie stars look and feel. Or maybe he\u2019s just getting lucky."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/ryan-gosling-crazy-stupid-love-perfect-celebrity>