Dane DeHaan

Dane DeHaan arrived in 2012 with two films pointing in opposite directions. Chronicle made him a found-footage teenager whose new powers curdle into something ugly. The Place Beyond the Pines put him at the end of a generational relay, playing the kid who inherits a mess he did not make. Both worked, both leaned on the same face, and for a couple of years he was the most in-demand young actor of that particular type.

The type is the gift and the problem. DeHaan looks bruised. He photographs like someone who has not slept, and directors kept casting the exhaustion rather than the actor. Kill Your Darlings is the strongest use of it. As Lucien Carr he is charming in a way that feels borrowed, a young man performing a bohemian confidence he has not earned, and the film only works because you can see the performance inside the performance.

Then came the studio years: Harry Osborn in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Lockhart in A Cure for Wellness, the title role in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Two of those belonged to franchises that stopped, one was a very expensive film almost nobody saw, and none of them wanted the thing he is actually good at. The work since has been better sized. Chris Lynwood in ZeroZeroZero, Lisey's Story and The Staircase all gave him room, and his short turn as Kenneth Nichols in Oppenheimer is bureaucratic hostility played with real relish. The leading-man detour looks increasingly like a misprint.