Amy Wallace /  Men’s Journal

Just a few months ago, Mickey Rourke was driving around Miami late one night, cruising the streets of his hometown, when his cell phone rang.

“Hey, it’s Bruce,” a familiar voice said, but at first Rourke couldn’t place it. “Springsteen,” the voice said. Rourke tears up a little when he remembers.

Rourke, who is 52, has known Springsteen for more than two decades — a span of time that includes at least a few of Rourke’s glory days and all of what he calls “my lost years.” During that period the actor basically told Hollywood to go fuck itself, became a not entirely unsuccessful professional boxer, got the shit beat out of him, and lost all traces of prettiness in his once-pretty face. Long before his recent comeback, he had found a good psycho therapist in the hopes, he says, of finally becoming — and this is a word he uses a lot — “accountable.”

Rourke has a lot to account for. Once he had been mighty. In the 1980s, Time magazine said he had the potential of a young Jack Nicholson, and New Yorker critic Pauline Kael praised his “edge and magnetism and … sweet, pure smile that surprises you. He seems to be acting to you, and to no one else.” With luck, she said, “Rourke could become a major actor.” Then he self-destructed. There were fistfights and violent marital squabbles (his ex-wife, the model Carré Otis, accused him of assault, then dropped the charges). There was prima donna behavior (he walked off a job because a producer wouldn’t let his beloved pet Chihuahua appear in a scene). There was poverty. And there were many truly awful movies.

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