DEPP CHARGE

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Donnie Brasco and Johnny Depp--the pair of diminutive and rhyming first names suggests, one hopes, larger reverberances between a compelling character and the fascinating young actor who plays him in a movie. Secretiveness and watchfulness are among the traits they share. So are tastes for danger, duplicity and disguise. Most significant, role playing is for both of them--albeit in rather different ways--a matter of life and death.

It's quite literally so for the hero of Donnie Brasco, Mike Newell's smart, suspenseful and neo-Scorsesian study of lowlife Mob life. Based on a true story, the film takes its title from the alias chosen by an undercover FBI man named Joe Pistone when he penetrated a New York Mafia family in the 1970s. He lived this lie for six years, knowing that one miscue, one bad line reading could be his death warrant. Then he spent twice that time testifying against men with whom he had developed certain dubious collegial bonds. Today Pistone, who emerged lately to do some cheerleading for the film, lives under yet another identity--the Mob has a long-standing $500,000 price on his head.

The stakes are obviously nowhere near as high for the performer who, Pistone says, "captured me 100%--my mannerisms, my walk, my talk." Nobody is going to car-bomb an actor who bombs; the worst he's going to suffer is bad reviews and, conceivably, a drop in his asking price. Even so, the evidence suggests that Depp is a man who comes into sharp focus and, more important, attains full life only when he loses himself in a role. The first time director John Badham met the actor he intended to cast in his thriller Nick of Time, he did not recognize him. "He looked like one of those Identi-Kit police drawings," he says, a rough sketch waiting to be rounded out and colored in by his next role.

To be sure, a figure bearing Depp's name runs, occasionally roughshod, through the tabloid life of our times. This guy is best known to the general public for trashing a hotel room a couple of years ago and getting busted for it, for his long-running liaison with supersvelte supermodel Kate Moss and for his proprietorship of the menacingly named Viper Room, the determinedly grungy rock club on Sunset Blvd. outside of which River Phoenix succumbed to a final overdose. What the public does not know is that this character is largely the figment of our gossip-debased collective unconscious.

A certain cultural laziness compounds this misapprehension. It's much easier to write Depp off as just another "actor boy," seeming to strike those inarticulately nihilistic poses that are the type's trademark, than it is to come seriously to grips with his astonishingly rangy body of work. Or even to catch it, since this Florida high school dropout, failed rocker and totally instinctive actor tends to work cult country, where a film's theatrical life-span can be nasty, brutal and short, but where these days the more interesting directors and writers hang out.