Penn is, however, this year's model in a different sense: Critics and peers alike are suddenly giving him his due as an artist hitting his mature stride. With ''Mystic River'' and ''21 Grams,'' Penn enters into a new stage in his career and life. He plays very different men -- one a working-class stiff, the other an emotionally adrift math professor -- but they share the burden of getting older and bearing heavy trauma in their lives. It's clear that Penn -- who's spent much of his career until now playing either deluded zonk-outs (''Fast Times at Ridgemont High,'' ''The Falcon and the Snowman,'' ''We're No Angels'') or ruthless young men on the make or on their way to death (''Carlito's Way,'' ''Dead Man Walking,'' ''Sweet and Lowdown'') -- has moved gracefully into middle-aged roles with the sharpened artistry that can come from experience and an increased desire to make every screen second count. He, of course, declines to put it so grandly.
''Well, the clothes of your life start to fit in middle age,'' he says. ''The stakes are raised; the more life you've lived, the more significant the places you can take a character. I'm in a couple of good movies right now. And they're timely in a way that seems rewarding to [audiences] who are willing to invest in the questions these movies raise.''
Which are?
''How do you resolve the sins of yesterday? Where is my child and how do I deal with the loss of that child? And where revenge fits into that, whether there's any real satisfaction when you exact that revenge. These are questions that maybe can never be answered, but the need for [asking them] is there.''
Dennis Lehane, author of the novel ''Mystic River,'' recalls a long night with Penn in the writer's native Boston shortly before filming began: ''We were in a bar, and we'd definitely had a few, and he said, 'Okay, now let's get to the missing time''' -- the unaccounted-for 25 years between childhood trauma and wounded adulthood that Lehane's novel skips to get to the central dilemma facing his character. ''We talked about Jimmy for an hour. He'd brought his copy of the book, which he'd gone through with a yellow highlighter. The passage where Jimmy reflects on the death of his daughter -- Sean had that circled, I could see. And he said to me, 'I'm not going there right now, but I will.' And I got a look, for a brief moment, into what an actor does -- he thrusts himself into a place where he can be a man who's lost his daughter. And this is a guy with kids; I can only imagine what kind of drain and empathy you must have to pull out of yourself to do that.''
Eastwood felt that Penn was the right guy for the mood he wanted to achieve with Jimmy. ''It's almost like fate has set the whole plot up from beginning to end, and he can't control where it's heading. Sean had the proper edge that some of the younger actors -- and I'm of an age where I can call somebody in his 40s young -- don't have. And yet he can also be sympathetic.''
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