Race, on its face, is still a moving target

WHAT IS going on in the zeitgeist when an African American is poised to become president and Robert Downey Jr. is in blackface? In the new comedy "Tropic Thunder," Downey plays actor Kirk Lazarus, a Russell Crowe-ish Aussie who is cast as a black soldier in a blood-and-guts Vietnam War epic. Method Man that he is, Lazarus dyes his skin, mats his hair and revamps his voice into a guttural drawl that's equal parts plantation and blaxploitation. His flared sideburns might have been modeled on Jim Brown's in "100 Rifles."

Ben Stiller co-wrote and directed "Tropic Thunder" and stars in it as a would-be war hero. He has said in interviews that Lazarus represents nothing more than a satirical swipe at overly intense actors, so let's start out by taking him at his word.

Viewed purely as performance, Downey's boundary-bending turn is an actor's holiday at the expense of actors -- specifically and self-mockingly Downey himself, whose intensity, like Daniel Day-Lewis', is notorious. "Tropic Thunder" opens with a faux trailer for an earlier Lazarus movie called "Satan's Alley," in which Downey plays a smoldering monk in what looks like a cross between "The Name of the Rose" and "Brokeback Mountain." Desire has made him molten.

It takes a prodigiously gifted actor to lampoon himself and still wipe everybody else off the screen. Throughout the shoot, on-screen and off, Lazarus never once falls out of character, not even with his scoffing black costar (Brandon T. Jackson), who thinks this white dude is crazy. You can't help admiring his nut-brain dedication. In the acting biz, absurdity and genius are never far apart. If you doubt it, consider this: Lazarus' folly and Laurence Olivier's jet-black Othello inhabit the same play-act continuum. Downey makes Lazarus both the butt and the paragon of his profession.

Downey -- whose previous Great Moment in Racial Comedy was an improvised scene in James Toback's "Black and White," in which he makes a pass at Mike Tyson and nearly gets pulverized for his troubles -- knows how to capture the self-delusions of the anointed. Lazarus is a five-time Oscar winner who doesn't realize how far out his Method has taken him. (Neither did Dustin Hoffman's prima donna in "Tootsie.") But he's quick to spot the exhibitionism of others.