Cinema: Benjamin Bratt

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Just one year ago, Benjamin Bratt was playing an accessory on Julia Roberts' red-carpet tour. Now he's commanding his own spotlight with a revelatory performance in Pinero. In this sordid, vibrant and true story, Bratt stars as Miguel Pinero, the Puerto Rican playwright, unrehabilitated ex-con, junkie and cautionary figure. In 1988, 14 years after founding Manhattan's Nuyorican Poets Cafe and gathering acclaim for his Tony-nominated play Short Eyes, Pinero died of cirrhosis at age 41.

Bratt, 38, hits lovely, seductive notes in director Leon Ichaso's ragged symphony of self-destruction. His Pinero shouts savage poetry from rooftops, rages against the ravages of disease and grasps at respect even while reaching for his next fix. Bratt has had four seasons on TV's Law & Order, an impressive turn as a drug kingpin in Traffic and has been game to support Sandra Bullock (Miss Congeniality) and Madonna (The Next Best Thing). But virtually no one realized he had this kind of performance in him. "For the last couple of months, I've been getting a lot of backhanded compliments, but it still feels good," says Bratt, who learned to chain-smoke for the part and immersed himself in the culture of the Lower East Side neighborhood where Pinero lived.

Co-executive producer John Leguizamo was going to star until he became squeamish about Pinero's enthusiasm for teenage boys. Bratt was tapped as a replacement after the producers caught his performance as a streetwise muralist in the barely released 1997 drama Follow Me Home. "When you look at Miguel's eyes and you look at Ben's eyes," says Ichaso, "there's something enchanting and devilish." The son of a Peruvian mother and a Caucasian father, Bratt says he was drawn to Pinero's "sense of marginalization. He wrote about the most raw, gritty, ugly things that exist in society."

Later this year Bratt will star in Abandon, written and directed by Traffic screenwriter Stephen Gaghan. Otherwise, his post-Julia life has become less public. He lives in San Francisco near his family and now has a relatively low-key romance with his Pinero co-star, Talisa Soto. "I have no particular career agenda," he says. "Your job as an actor is to stay employed." Thanks to Pinero, that job should be getting a lot easier. --J.C.