importance of keeping your personal flame alight that recall the Huck Finn-ish sneaker-clad boulevardier who talked Julie Delpy into getting off a train in Before Sunrise. But there's no mistaking the black halo Hawke wears these days. The guy has taken a beating – the worst of it, one suspects, self-administered.

"I call it the black years," he says of the period following his divorce in 2004, sequestered in the delicious post-punk rot of the Chelsea hotel. "It was really difficult. It was difficult in ways I couldn't even see at the time. There was the obvious way in which it was difficult – the death of a dream, the inability to parent in the way that you want to. But for me it was – what's that Dante27. It was three years after Reality Bites came out. I look at pictures of myself and wonder: what was I thinking?" What was he thinking? "I think I thought when I was younger that I would, like, get things and then it would all be easy. You'd be able to walk whatever road you wanted and then sadly you would start having arthritis, but by then you'd have kids and everything would be fine. I didn't really understand what a meandering road adulthood is."

In 2009, he wrote a lengthy Rolling Stone profile of the singer and actor Kris Kristofferson, at one time the biggest multi-platform star in America, who took a single bullet (Heaven's Gate) and heard himself described as "washed up" on the radio. An act