Stephen Dorff has gotten a second chance at having a solid career. He’s the lead in Sofia Coppola’s new film, Somewhere (costarring cutie Elle Fanning), and Dorff is being sent out on the promotional trail where, I think it’s safe to say, he’s back to being really, really hot. Maybe he was always hot. But give him a good film with good buzz, and suddenly things are looking up, right? Anyway, Dorff covers the New York Times’ Fall Fashion something or other. The photos are gorgeous, and the interview is lovely:

Back in 1994, in the afterglow of his first big role — playing the doomed fifth Beatle, Stuart Sutcliffe, in “Backbeat” — Stephen Dorff did what any self-respecting young actor might do when the checks start coming in. He moved into the Chateau Marmont.

“I had some money and I didn’t have a place to live,” Dorff, now 37, explained during a recent stopover in Manhattan. “So I said, ‘You know what? I’m checking into the Chateau.’ ”

He toasted his 21st birthday with a “wild party” in one of the four bungalows. The premiere bash for “Backbeat” was held in its famous garden, where 700 guests, including Pia Zadora, Tori Spelling and Keith Richards, jockeyed for chicken skewers and face time with the newly minted star. Life at the Chateau was grand — for a while.

“It got to the point where my business manager called and said, ‘Stephen, you need to take a movie or get a job, ’cause you’re out of money.’ And I said, ‘O.K., I guess I’m moving out.’ ”

Dorff did move out and he did get jobs, good ones: putting on a blond wig as Candy Darling in “I Shot Andy Warhol,” taking the lead in John Waters’s “Cecil B. DeMented” and sprouting fangs as the vampire Deacon Frost in the B-movie semi-blockbuster “Blade,” a role that earned him a 1999 MTV Movie Award for Best Villain. The 2000s saw him lighting up the Gawkersphere with an impressive roster of girlfriends (from Milla Jovovich to Pamela Anderson), an alleged death threat left on a rival’s answering machine and a contretemps with Jeremy Piven on the men’s-room line at Bungalow 8. (Piven: “You’re a has-been!” Dorff: “You’re only on TV! Cable TV!”)

It was bad-boy time, but, still, there were highlights: Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center,” the prison-yard drama “Felon” and Michael Mann’s gangster epic, “Public Enemies.”

Then last year Dorff found himself checking back into the Chateau Marmont, that fortresslike retreat above Sunset Boulevard where Hollywood stars — and would-be stars — go to hide out in plain sight. The occasion was Sofia Coppola’s latest movie, “Somewhere,” which required Dorff to hole up in Room 69 for three weeks while he tackled the role of Johnny Marco, an actor whose career is on cruise control while his life is veering into a ditch. If he’s not tooling around aimlessly in his Ferrari F430, he’s in his suite at the Chateau enjoying in-room pole-dancing performances by a pair of extremely dexterous blonde twins. Johnny’s tabloid-worthy torpor is broken only by the unexpected arrival of his 11-year-old daughter from a broken marriage, Cleo (the luminously cute Elle Fanning). What ensues is the most inspired father-daughter buddy movie since “Paper Moon,” shot through with the freeway-bound ennui of “Play It as It Lays.” It forms a kind of diptych with Coppola’s much-loved “Lost in Translation”: disaffected actor, younger female, hotel, bittersweet moments strung together with precise calibration.

In person, Dorff is resplendently disheveled in a green tank top. He retains the compact and pugnacious aura of a terrier, an effect heightened by glinting, buff-colored eyes and an upturned nose.

“It was the ultimate role at the ultimate time,” he says of Johnny Marco, the character Coppola wrote with him in mind. “I went through a period where I just didn’t get much interesting work. I felt like I didn’t want to do it anymore. And then, out of nowhere, I get this gift.”

The feeling was compounded by the loss of his mother, Nancy, to cancer in 2008. (The actor’s father, the songwriter Steve Dorff, composed “Every Which Way but Loose,” and Dorff grew up around L.A.).

“She always wanted me to play a father, to grow up in film. I know she had something to do with this one.” Among Dorff’s many tattoos — including the number 73, the year of his birth — is one that simply reads NANCY.

The actor’s return to the Chateau isn’t so much a comeback as it is a homecoming — to the edgy, eye-grabbing roles Dorff embraced in the heady period of his first success. Coppola’s camera lingers on him as he shuffles along in Red Wing boots, smokes Camel Lights down to the filters and drains one Corona after another. Dorff’s Johnny Marco is all eye bags, forehead creases, three-day scruff and the occasional mysterious facial abrasion. What could be his motto appears on an Ed Ruscha print that Dorff sourced himself and propped up in Johnny’s room: COLD BEER BEAUTIFUL GIRLS. (He counts Ruscha as a friend and “the epitome of cool.”)

“Stephen had to carry the whole thing,” says Coppola, who has known Dorff since the “Backbeat” era. “And he’s not hiding behind a big performance. You always see pictures of him at these parties, but his persona is really different — a serious actor and a sweet guy.”

Dorff had just returned from Coppola’s rented villa in Tuscany, where he happily played uncle to her 3-year-old daughter, Romy. Wife and kids are clearly on his mind. But are they on the way? Not quite, although Coppola has issued “an age cutoff” for his future girlfriends. Despite all the talk of growing up, à la Johnny Marco, Dorff says no one is waiting for him back at his Malibu beach pad — just his vintage guitars and keyboards. He’s been swept up in next year’s projects, playing the porn star Dick Shadow in the Adam Sandler-penned “Born to Be a Star” and starring with Mickey Rourke in Tarsem Singh’s “Immortals,” which he describes as “ ‘Gladiator’ meets ‘300.’ ”

Even so, Dorff is still savoring his latest stay at the Chateau, as if wishing he could check out anytime he likes but never leave. “I told Sofia, ‘If we ever get a chance to work again, just make the shoot longer.’ I was so happy on this movie. I wanted it to last forever.”

[From The New York Times]

An “age cutoff” for girlfriends? Meaning they can’t be older than a certain age or they can’t be younger than a certain age? I’m hoping the former.

Meanwhile, this film, Somewhere, has a big controversy attached to it now. Even though critics were mostly impressed with Somewhere when it premiered at Venice, those same critics – especially in Italy – are now questioning whether it deserved to take home the Venice Film Festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion for Best Film. You see, Sofia Coppola’s ex-boyfriend and good friend Quentin Tarantino was the president of VFF’s jury, and SHOCK – most of the winners in Venice were people Tarantino has personal relationships with. Movieline has the whole story here, including this statement by QT: “I wasn’t going to let anything like that affect me at all. I was just going to literally respond to the film. There was no me steering any direction. It enchanted us from the first. Being her friend didn’t affect me or make me sway the jury in any way. The other members of the jury don’t know her at all. They just loved the film. We kept coming back to it, as one of us said, because ‘it’s a great f*cking movie,” all right?’” Ooh, Mila Kunis won a prize for Black Swan too! Nice. Vincent Gallo won Best Actor though. Eyeroll.

Photos courtesy of The NYT & The Fashion Spot.