Putting That MTV Guy to Death : Denis Leary still has the bite that cemented his antsy persona, from ‘No Cure for Cancer’ to his Cindy Crawford ravings. But with ‘The Ref,’ he’s set his sights higher. Is America ready for Denis Leary, movie star?

You can smoke in the bar at the Hotel Nikko Beverly Hills, but almost nobody does. Except Denis Leary. That’s him, slouching in a black-leather sofa over in the shadows, firing up another cigarette, ordering a platter of shrimp, the guy with the fine Irish features and drunken-altar-boy roll to his shoulders who, in this dim light, looks astonishingly like Bryan Adams.

Leary would hate the comparison. To his way of thinking, high-rotation rock stars like Adams and R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe should be rounded up and euthanized. In “No Cure for Cancer,” Leary’s breakthrough 1990 one-man show, the writer, actor and comedian seethed: “See that scar on my wrist? Know what that’s from? I heard the Bee Gees were getting back together.” Smoke and spit flying, Leary added: “We live in a country where John Lennon takes six bullets in the chest and Yoko Ono--who’s standing right next to him-- doesn’t get one ? Stevie Ray Vaughan is dead and we can’t get Jon Bon Jovi into a helicopter? Do we need a two-hour movie about the Doors? No, I can sum it up in five seconds: I’m drunk, I’m nobody; I’m drunk, I’m famous; I’m drunk, I’m dead.”

“No Cure for Cancer,” which Leary assembled while marooned in England after his wife, Ann Lembeck, went into premature labor there, created a sensation Off Broadway in 1991. The show spawned a book, a cable-TV special, an album for A&M; Records and, indirectly, a series of 60-second spots for MTV in which Leary smoked, paced and raved about everything from Rodney G. King to Cindy Crawford.

Now, almost inevitably, the 36-year-old Leary, thwarted hockey player, former acting teacher, part-time house painter and reluctant stand-up comedian, the son of blue-collar Irish-American parents from Worcester, Mass., wants to establish himself in mainstream movies. It’s a career path strewn--literally--with the bodies of comedian-cum-actors who went before him. For every Chevy Chase and Robin Williams, there’s a John Belushi or a Sam Kinison--fire-breathing comics in Leary’s mold suffocated by Hollywood’s commercial expectations. Even Eric Bogosian and Spalding Gray, theatrically grounded performance artists like Leary whose effortless irony and intelligence he approaches, have yet to make films that match the magnetism of their stage personae.

Leary, nevertheless, is trying, even if his film resume thus far is almost direct-to-video. He co-starred with Emilio Estevez in “Judgment Night,” turned up in “The Sandlot” and “Demolition Man” and, earlier this year, in “Gunmen,” a movie his publicists won’t even list on his credits.

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Now comes “The Ref,” Leary’s first starring vehicle, with its first-class cast (Judy Davis, Kevin Spacey), big-time executive producers (Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson) and big-time expectations. With no bankable stars and a freshman director (Leary’s close friend, Ted Demme, who directed the MTV spots), the movie, which opens Wednesday, rests squarely on Leary’s shoulders.

Playing a cat burglar who takes hostage a bickering couple (Davis and Spacey), Leary delivers a variation on his suffer-no-fools MTV persona much the way Robin Williams riffed his way through “Good Morning, Vietnam.” Although the role plays to Leary’s comic strengths, it also brings him to the brink of type-casting. “The Ref” could be his breakthrough but it could also be a trap, and Leary knows it.

“Having come from outside of films and wanting to get in, and knowing that that (MTV guy) image existed, I was concerned, because I didn’t want to get stuck with it,” he explains in his raspy Boston brogue, cigarette smoldering in the ashtray. “I also understand the reason you get cast in something is that they want what they’ve seen. Strangely enough, (‘Ref’ screenwriter) Richard LaGravenese was a guy I went to Emerson College (in Boston) with back in ’78 and never heard from again. He had written the script without thinking about me at all, but there was an element to the character that was recognizable as what people consider the MTV guy, which is why, quite frankly, they made the movie.”

Theoretically, “The Ref” is the bridge that will take Leary, who appeared in productions at the Boston Shakespeare Company after graduating from Emerson in 1979, to meatier, more serious roles. Leary cites Steve Martin, who deftly jettisoned his arrow-through-the-head “wild and crazy guy” and eventually became accepted as a credible actor.

“It becomes a matter of your attention span,” he continues. “Doing the same character over and over, it gets boring. You end up like LeRoy Neiman. I mean, how many goddamn golf events can you go to and paint?”

“My gut feeling about Denis is, he can act,” says Doug Herzog, MTV’s senior vice president of programming, who attended Emerson with Leary. “He’s obviously a comedian, but at the end of the day, he’s an actor.”

Adds Michael Gruber, one of Leary’s agents: “It’s a weird Catch-22. Everybody who wants to be in business with Denis now are the people who wouldn’t meet him two years ago, because he wasn’t, in their eyes, an actor. Denis was always willing to prove he could act, but there are times that people just won’t open their doors, especially to people coming out of the stand-up world. But look at Tom Hanks, Robin Williams--nobody wanted to see them in a drama five years ago, and look at them now.”

In any event, Disney has already green lighted the next Leary vehicle, “Two If by Sea,” a comedy Leary wrote with writing partner Michael Armstrong. Also on deck is “Noose,” a drama--”funny, but in a very dark way”--written by Leary and Armstrong with Leary’s wife, Ann, supplying the story. Meanwhile, as Leary sinks ever deeper into Hollywood, the notes for his next one-man show, “Birth, School, Work, Death,” molder in journals back in his apartment on New York’s Upper West Side.

“I’m actually looking forward to getting back to it--it’s almost a year now since I’ve been onstage,” he says. “Bogosian just opened his new show in New York. I haven’t seen that yet, but I know when I do I’m gonna come out juiced up and wanting to get back onstage.”

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Leary has, one way or another, always been onstage. The younger of two sons in a family that included a pair of daughters, he quickly sized up his chances and became the pop-off kid.

“My brother was a wild man,” Leary recalls. “He was a very funny guy, but he was quieter than I was, and, generally speaking, there’s never two wise-asses. Thinking back on it, I got away with a lot of stuff because my brother was so big. You could say something to somebody, and they’d want to hit you, but they couldn’t because there was always this really big guy standing a couple of feet away who they knew was your brother.”

Leary remembers his father, an Irish immigrant, as a devoted parent, if somewhat emotionally reserved. In “No Cure for Cancer,” he recalled how during his brother’s 10th birthday party, his father calmly walked in from the living room, where he had been cutting paneling with a circular saw, his thumb nearly severed.

“And I’m thinking, ‘Wow, Dad’s thumb is hanging off. He’s probably gonna start crying any second now.’ And this is what my father says: ‘We got any tape around here? I need to tape this baby up.’ He wouldn’t let my mother drive him to the hospital. That was too much a threat to his masculinity--to be seen in a car driven by a woman. So he taped up his thumb with black electrical tape and drove himself to the hospital. I looked at my brother and said, ‘Hey pal, forget about crying. We’re never going to be able to cry about anything, ever. Our authority figure is a man who could cut his head off with a chain saw, and he’d staple-gun it back on.’ ”

“My dad was very much a John Wayne kind of guy,” says Leary, “but he was also a great guy, great sense of humor, a real dedicated dad. I don’t think he ever missed a hockey game I was in. Actually, I hope I raise my kids”--a young son and daughter--”the way my parents raised me, because they did a pretty good job. The most important thing, which we thought was normal, was that they were married for, God, 35 or 40 years. (Leary’s father died in 1985 while visiting family in Ireland, two days after his 60th birthday.) We just assumed all families were like that. They scream and yell and grab food and fight at the table, but you don’t lose anybody. Some people are in the penalty box, but they’re always there. I think a lot of the problems people have are based on their parents walking away from their responsibilities, which is the easiest way out.”

Ruminating on the recent Olympic soap opera, Leary says: “Tonya Harding’s mother is married eight times. There’s a picture of her mother in some magazine in a fur coat with a bird on her shoulder. I looked at that picture and that to me summed the whole thing up: Every time you come home there’s a different dad and the same bird, y’know?”

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At 17, Leary was ensconced in parochial high school, tabulating his limited options. “I wasn’t the best student,” he admits. “I wasn’t stupid, but I wasn’t paying a lot of attention. By then, I knew I wasn’t going to play professional sports because I just wasn’t good enough. I knew I wanted to write or act. I’m really happy I went to a Catholic school because a lot of the repressive tactics they use make for great senses of humor. You’re always laughing your ass off when you’re not supposed to be.”

Leary left the family home in Worcester and enrolled at Emerson, studying acting, where he met Steven Wright and a clutch of other young comics who would soon burst out of Boston onto the national scene. Leary, though, was the big man on campus. “What I remember about Denis, at Emerson, was that he was like a celebrity,” says MTV’s Herzog, “just enough arrogance to make it work.”

After graduation, Leary returned to Emerson to teach comedy writing and improvisation. “It was just 10 of us in a room going over work, so it wasn’t really like I was teaching . . . but for two hours every third day, you had a place where you could go even though you were driving a pizza delivery truck or working in a chemical plant, and it would just be all about this creative work.”

Meanwhile, he was breaking into Boston’s comedy scene in his own bullheaded fashion. Rather than submit completely to the vicissitudes of the clubs, he booked his own room and presented stand-up, sketches and song parodies. “When you’re a young comic, you’re lucky to get on once every two weeks,” says Paul Barclay, owner of Boston’s Comedy Connection, who booked Leary early on. “If you have your own space, you’re it. Every Saturday night, he could do his own show.”

Stand-up, in any event, was problematic, because Leary refused to edit his scatology-heavy material. “It was hard to get him work,” says Barclay. “He’d play a middle-age crowd the same as a college crowd. He was good, funny, but he decided, no matter what, not to compromise.”

Leary finally moved to New York, working the downtown clubs where he could let his material roam as far afield from standards of decorum as he pleased. In March, 1990, he flew to London with his pregnant wife to appear on the BBC television show “Paramount City.” The show was scheduled for Saturday night; on Saturday morning, Denis and Ann’s son, Jack, was born 12 weeks prematurely. With a wife and son conscripted by doctors not to leave England for five months, Leary stumbled into an invitation to present a one-man show at the Edinburgh International Arts Festival. The show, “No Cure for Cancer,” was a hit, moved to London’s West End, and then to New York, where Ted Demme, then the director of “Yo! MTV Raps,” caught it and had an epiphany.

“Everything he said was something I was feeling or wanted to say,” recalls Demme. “I called him the next day and said, ‘You may or may not know who I am, but I need to talk to you.’ ” Over burgers, Demme told Leary, “Listen, I think we could do something funny.” Two weeks later, they were shooting Leary’s first pace-and-smoke spots for MTV. For good or ill, the MTV guy was born.

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Back at the Nikko’s bar, Leary is smoking his umpteenth cigarette, marveling at the calibrations of his favorite writers. (Leary himself writes an occasional column for Details magazine--”a totally low-maintenance writer,” says his editor, Joe Dolce. “His great skill is poking fun at everybody and not insulting anybody--he’s angry, but not mean-spirited.”)

There’s Ian Frazier’s New Yorker piece about Wyle E. Coyote suing the Acme company--”I had to stop, like, five times to laugh out loud, which you almost never do when you’re reading.” There’s Albert Brooks--”He’s one of those guys, I own all his movies, I can pop in a scene for the 40th time and just die laughing.”

Leary’s taste is telling, and speaks well of the sturdiness of his own writing. Unlike many young comics, he knows the difference between jokes and humor.

“I could never write a joke,” Leary declares. “I can’t tell a joke. I can tell stories. Where I grew up, it was always funny stories--the Irish thing, very oral. Humor always came out of the funny things that this guy did, or the funny thing that happened to this character. Jokes are great, they’re terrific--Steve Wright’s jokes are almost abstract, like haiku. But humor, the real deep laugh, comes from reality and character and situation.

“The thing that made ‘The Honeymooners,’ which to me is like American Shakespeare, wasn’t the jokes. It was the situation and the people. Same with the Seinfeld show and Albert Brooks: There are memorable lines, quotable tracts of dialogue, but it all comes from the situation.’

It’s one reason Leary never cared much for stand-up. “I eventually realized I ended writing (‘No Cure’) because I was frustrated and I knew I was never going to hit these zanies and funny bones,” he says. “Which was fine, because everybody I knew who was doing stand-up was coming back like a Vietnam vet. My friends had these horror stories--you’re stuck in a comedy condo with some juggler in Ohio after the show, and there’s nothing to do and you’re trying to just watch TV and go to sleep, and the juggler is like, ‘Hey man! Watch this!’ And he’s juggling oranges, and you’re part of his act. I’d be in a prison right now in Ohio. Guys would be going, ‘I killed my parents and chopped up my wife. What did you do?’ And I’d say, ‘I lit this juggler on fire a week ago in a comedy club.’

Leary stubs out his last cigarette. “I can’t,” he says, with some gravity, “live in a comedy condo. Y’know?”