Don’t call it a comeback

You can forgive Josh Brolin for coming off like some adjunct professor from the school of hard knocks when he’s discussing the life lessons that have shaped his outlook -- essential truths that accompany watching his stock rise and fall and rise again. After all, the journeyman actor has faced both feast and famine in Hollywood.

Over a two-decade-plus career, he has been pigeonholed variously as a jock (in his debut kid flick, 1985’s “The Goonies”), a cocky young leading man (in his Old West TV series “The Young Riders”) and anointed as “one to watch” after his turn as an armpit-licking bisexual cop in his breakout film, “Flirting With Disaster.” From there, Brolin, 39, has gone on to be typecast as the mustachioed baddie in assorted action movies and vanish into plain sight in forgettable character parts that comprise much of his recent filmography.

“I learned a lot. I made a lot of mistakes,” Brolin said, squinting out over Santa Monica Bay on a cloudless morning.

More to the point, there were years he hardly worked at all, preferring underemployment to high-profile schlock (he rationalizes passing on “The Dukes of Hazzard” by imagining himself on his deathbed, the role flashing before his eyes). But over the last seven months, Brolin has quietly built up a head of career steam, appearing as yet another menacing man with a mustache in Robert Rodriguez’s segment of the cartoonishly violent “Grindhouse” and a cameo (again with mustache) in Paul Haggis’ mystery-drama “In the Valley of Elah.” “He’s a picky s.o.b.,” Haggis said. “It isn’t that things weren’t being offered to him. He was turning down terrific roles! I guess he’s an actor first, a movie star second.”

With roles in two of winter’s most eagerly anticipated films -- a small part as an evil narc in Ridley Scott’s drug dealer epic “American Gangster,” which reaches theaters Friday, and a breakout performance in the Coen brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel “No Country for Old Men,” out Nov. 9 -- Brolin is poised to convince audiences and A-list directors alike that his sudden multiplex ubiquity is no fluke.

“If you detach yourself and become disciplined, you make your money,” Brolin continued, sipping the day’s umpteenth cup of coffee. “When you lose, just admit you’ve lost and take the loss.”

But in this instance, Brolin hasn’t been talking about Hollywood survival. He’s explaining the mind-set governing his real passion, the sideline that got him through some lean years: day trading. He’s so serious about playing Wall Street, he’s got the trade station with three computer screens going simultaneously in his house on the Westside. And he even co-created marketprobability.com, a website giving investors historical stock overviews.

Brolin was late for our interview because he got caught up selling his stock in China Petrochemical once his shares had quadrupled. “I love the competitive part of stocks. A lot of fear and greed, that’s all it is,” he said. “All I see is green and red. It’s the end of the third quarter and I’m up 43% for the year.”

He has plenty of other reasons to feel chipper, judging from early critical reaction to “No Country,” which screened at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. In the action-packed morality tale, Brolin portrays a West Texas cowboy of few words who goes on the run after stumbling across $2 million in drug smuggler cash, pursued by a quasi-mystical professional killer (Javier Bardem) and a do-right small town sheriff struggling with his own mortality (Tommy Lee Jones). So far, reviewers have been reaching for the superlatives in describing Brolin’s performance -- “touchingly human” and “career-defining” capture the general consensus.

But even for a good ole boy who grew up on a ranch in Paso Robles, getting right his character’s cowboy sang froid -- his stoic yet sentient calm in the face of surreal violence and tragic comedy -- proved daunting. “You go through 10 minutes without any dialogue whatsoever and it has to be filled with inner dialogue,” said Brolin. “It’s easy to slip into overcompensating. Doing things like scratching that aren’t appropriate to that moment. You feel you’re being boring. That was my paranoia.”

Playing through the pain

A freak accident, however, nearly took him out of the film. After failing at first to land the role the Coen brothers term “the action center of the film” -- and with the help of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, who shot Brolin’s audition tape on a million-dollar Genesis camera while working on “Grindhouse” -- Brolin made it to the final round of auditions and iced the part of Llewelyn Moss (who, yes, sports a walrus-like ‘stache that would make Tom Selleck envious). Two days later, he was happily riding his motorcycle in Hollywood when he slammed into a car and snapped his collarbone.

“I didn’t say anything to anybody for a week until my lawyer said I had to, that I was liable,” Brolin recalled. “I was under the impression that you grit through it and if nobody knows, that’s better. So I told Ethan [Coen] I had a hairline fracture. But it was a clean, absolute break. I’m asking the doctors if I should have an operation. But there was the risk of an infection and no movie. It’s the Coen brothers! I’m trying to decide all this on four grams of morphine.”

Less than three weeks later, he was on set in Marfa, Texas, and soldiering through his scenes, the physical pain lending his character -- who gets shot, attacked by pit bulls and falls off a cliff -- a world-weary gravitas. “It worked for me,” he said, “in a funny, bizarre way that can only happen on a Coen brothers film.”

Brolin’s family members’ Q ratings have often obscured his own fame -- his father is actor James Brolin, his stepmother is Barbra Streisand and his wife is actress Diane Lane. But the younger Brolin does world-weary well; he’s raced cars and competitively surfed and spent years livin’ la vida loca. (“I made mincemeat out of myself in the early days.”)

Still, he doesn’t mind the Hollywood shorthand for him that often crops up: “A young Nolte.” “I love Nick Nolte so that is not an insult,” Brolin said.

“Whatever you need to do to validate my existence, whatever you need to parallel it with, go and do it,” he added. “It’s going to change and I’m going to be somebody else next year. And maybe one day I’ll be the prototype. ‘You’re a Josh Brolin-type. Jesus Christ. What have you been through?’ ”

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chris.lee@latimes.com