Cruise is a self-described "shooter," a guy who likes to work nonstop, to jump from one project to the next without a lot of second thoughts and searching reappraisals. He has cracked off twelve pictures in his relatively short career. Each was as fully ambitious a work as he felt capable of at the time. No one can deny that his latest, Born on the Fourth of July, is a serious actor-artist's movie. Cruise is surprisingly good, as convincing in the small details as in the large emotional truths. To play the role, he plunged into the grim realities of paraplegia, visiting hospital wards, wheeling around West L.A. with Ron Kovic, even learning to get into bed at night from a wheelchair. He says he wanted the part as soon as he read the script, which originally had been written in 1978 by Kovic and Stone, based on Kovic's National Book Award-winning autobiography. Back then, Al Pacino was cast in the lead, but the plug was pulled three days before filming was to commence.

"Oliver Stone promised if he ever broke through," says Kovic, "if he ever got the opportunity to direct, he would come back for me. He said it was like an old marker for him." Soon after the phenomenal success of Platoon in 1987, Stone called Kovic and told him the time was right — they were back in business.

Cruise, who was born on the third of July in 1962, has no real memories of the living-room war nor of the way it radically divided the country, with longhaired freaks lining up on Independence Day to flip the finger at veterans wearing Bomb Hanoi buttons. The film re-creates the polarization of that era in gripping detail. Indeed, for those who were young and impassioned during those years and have since found themselves straining to remember why such a fuss was made in the late Sixties, the experience of the film is like entering a time machine. Cruise himself is a child of the mid-Seventies post-vietnam amnesia. "I remember arguing with kids on the playground about who won the war," he says. "Kids said, 'Oh, we won Vietnam, we're America.' In school we were not learning anything about it." Cruise became seized by a desire to portray the intensity of the experiences that an older generation had had during the Vietnam era. "I never told Oliver this," he says, "but I thought it was almost his life story, too, his Coming Home."

Both Stone and Kovic, who had met separately with Sean Penn and Charlie Sheen to discuss the role, felt Cruise had the deepest affinity for the lead character. He and Kovic shared working-class backgrounds, Catholicism, even high-school wrestling. The first time they met, at Kovic's Redondo Beach home, Cruise ran up the driveway and hugged him. "I had my doubts before he came that day," says Kovic. "I wondered if he had the depth to portray me. We had a meeting in my kitchen for several hours, and Tom explained that he really wanted to do this, and he was not going to let me down. I was looking at him, saying to myself, 'He's so full of life. He's so sure. He's so representative of America before the war.' I was thinking, "He's about to go through this hell, and he doesn't even know it.' I was convinced he wouldn't be the same when he came out of this."

To hear the star and director tell it, the making of this picture was a small military campaign in itself, a sixty-four-day siege. Stone says Cruise "was on edge every day. He was out there. It was very tough for him physically and emotionally." Cruise calls it the biggest gamble of his career and also his most important role. I asked Stone which scenes were the toughest for Cruise. "The toughest?" the director says. "Everything was tough as far as I was concerned. Having fights with your mother. Having a fight with your brother. A fight in a bar with all this smoke. Getting physically thrown out of your chair at the Republican convention at three on some freezing morning and being dragged along sidewalks, yelling at the top of your lungs. It was all exhausting."

If Cruise's role was a piece of risky business, he did not appear anxious or unsure on the set. On the contrary, before a big scene he would be skipping rope like a prizefighter. Then he'd yell, "Let's rock and roll!" and run onto the set.

Cast and crew moved from the United States to the Philippines to shoot the Vietnam scenes. After the combat sequences were wrapped, the very next day the schedule called for a scene that in the movie takes place in a Mexican resort, a kind of Margaritaville for paraplegics. Kovic, who went to Vietnam a virgin and returned paralyzed from the middle of the chest down, spends the first night of his life with a woman, a Mexican prostitute.

For Cruise, this love scene was the most demanding of the entire shoot. He felt drained after filming the battle sequences, and there was the touchiness of the subject matter. "He's a very shy boy," says Stone. "And he had to do several scenes with whores. It was tough for him."

Cruise had spent time with paraplegics and discovered that they can have active sex lives even if they don't climax in a conventional sense. He discusses this frankly and with sensitivity. He recalls that several takes of him with the hooker were tried but rejected. After having played Kovic in a wheelchair on the set in Dallas, he was having difficulty getting into character again as a paraplegic. "I was going at it, and it wasn't working," he says. "I'd nailed the character in Dallas, and then we'd done Vietnam, and then I had a scene where I had to be Ron in a wheelchair again. I was just like, 'I don't know where I am. I lost it. Am I Kovic now?' I remember I was so physically exhausted. I said, 'Oliver, I'm sorry, man, I just don't have it. I'm lost.' He said, 'You are Kovic, just do it, don't think about it.' "

They tried it one more time. "I always just saw the scene," Cruise says. "I mean, you can't act all the complexities: 'I'll never feel the inside of a woman. I can feel the pressure of her body, but I'll never feel her skin against my chest. I'll never really.' That whole thing. And also the beauty of this woman, holding a naked woman for the first time and how incredible that is."

In his performance, Cruise was building toward some kind of climax. Unexpectedly, tears started flowing down his cheeks. "I remember doing the scene and just letting go, and that's when I started crying," he says. "That wasn't written in the script. That's when we got the whole thing. Paraplegics talk about almost an emotional orgasm that they feel."

That's what Cruise got, a grace note as an actor with all the immediacy of a sexual climax.

By Oliver Stone's reckoning, two months of filmmaking is like six months of real life. It ages everyone involved. Indeed, Cruise seems much older than his twenty-seven years. "I think he became middle-aged making this movie," Stone says of his star. "I think he passed out of his youth truly into early middle age. He'll never be the same boy that he was before. He knows too much now."

After Born finished shooting, Stone and Cruise both traveled through Southeast Asia, their paths crossing in Bangkok. "You've done a great job, Tom," Stone said one night when he ran into Tom and Mimi. "You should go out and just be young and enjoy the autumn of your youth. Because it's gonna go. Go out now and have a fucking ball."

"You're right," Cruise said. And he did unwind a bit, taking time off to travel in Europe with Mimi. But pretty soon he was back in the driver's seat, charging hard into his next project, the stock-car-racing movie, due out this summer.

He is charging hard right this minute as he fights the end-of-day traffic on Sunset, racing to return me to my own car. We are now on easy terms, talking excitedly about lightweight subjects, and I don't pay attention to where he's driving. He swings up to a hotel, thinking it's where I'm parked, but it's the wrong place. My car is a good fifteen minutes in the opposite direction. Cruise is already several minutes late for a six o'clock meeting, so I volunteer to jump out and catch a cab. Forget it, he says. He'll return me to my car. "Let's rock and roll!" he shouts and roars back into the rush-hour traffic.