Joseph Gordon-Levitt

The Walk wobbled, Snowden failed to deliver and The Sandman collapsed. Is The Dark Knight Rises’ boy wonder due a comeback?

In 2018, Joseph Gordon-Levitt wrote a passionate defence of

The Last Jedi on medium. He gave props to rian Johnson’s faith that audiences would welcome the brave decision to test Luke’s faith in the Force. Gordon-Levitt also cameo-ed in alien drag on screen, all of which begs the question: why don’t we see him unmasked in big, bold, Jedi-sized movies so much nowadays?

Although fatherhood and his online creative hub, HitRecord, have consumed much of his time lately, the last films Gordon-Levitt headlined may also explain his slight screen retreat. For The Walk, he trained hard to mimic highwire daredevil Philippe Petit’s elegant balance and made light work of drawing audiences into his vertiginous POV, only to see the film stumble with audiences. Having compared Petit in interview to Edward Snowden, Gordon-Levitt played the NSA whistleblower in Oliver Stone’s biopic, which also struggled to reach viewers and awards bodies. To date, Oscar noms have eluded him.

Like Luke’s faith, that needs fixing. Sure, he’s wavered between bad luck and off-beam choices lately. Allegedly, he rejected Guardians Of The Galaxy for Sin City: A Dame To Kill For; also on the comics front, his tantalising coupling with Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman fell through when rights changed hands. But a glance back to 2012-3 tells you what we are missing. He made virtue gripping in The Dark Knight Rises, energised cycling thriller Premium Rush, sold Looper’s time-travel contentions despite looking nothing like Bruce Willis, and made a porn addict likeable in his directorial debut, Don Jon. His easy physicality helped sell one of modern cinema’s most elegant, thrilling set-pieces: Inception’s corridor fight.

A deeper dive takes you to Mysterious Skin, where he graduated from TV’s

3rd Rock From The Sun with a heartbreaking study in haunted empathy as a wired and wounded teen hustler. That soulful swagger also lit up Johnson’s teen-noir indie Brick, before he hotfooted to romcom renown in (500) Days Of Summer. He might revitalise his dancing feet for proposed musical comedy Wingmen; elsewhere, TV returns beckon via Amazon-backed planehijack drama 7500, Henry Joost/Ariel Schulman’s untitled Netflix sci-fi and A24/Apple’s Mr Corman. But where is the movie comeback he deserves? If Johnson starts amassing adherents for his new Star Wars trilogy soon, his old pal has got the right/write stuff. KH