Ryan Gosling vs. Nick Stahl
Battle of the Sensitive/Psychotic Blonds

Making the transition from creepily precocious child star to relatively normal adult -- with reputation and attractiveness intact -- is extremely difficult for female performers, but it's nigh on impossible for their male counterparts. Pubescent girls in our culture are worshipped and adored -- as we hardly need tell our readership in the week following the Olsen twins' eighteenth birthday. Pubescent boys, on the other hand, are generally not pleasing to the eye. Girls just (generally) get a bit taller and rounder, but boys shoot up too quickly (in height, perverts) or in awkward spurts (um...still talking about their height, and you are gross), so they're tall and gangly, clumsy on their suddenly enormous feet, unable to wash their faces frequently enough to stay ahead of their industrious sebaceous glands. The difference between the way Lindsay Lohan looks in The Parent Trap (age twelve) and now (seventeen) is pretty slight, if you look at a shot from the present that crops out her gigantic boobs. The difference between the way Haley Joel Osment looks in The Sixth Sense (age eleven) and now (sixteen) is stunning; it's like the only parts of his body that grew are his neck and his front teeth. And some do recognize the disadvantage at which boy actors find themselves as they age; why do you think the factory issues a new model Culkin prototype every few years?

Ryan Gosling and Nick Stahl are rare among grown-up male child actors (that's some tangled syntax, but stay with us) in that they've remained cute even throughout the traditionally unfortunate pubescent years. Maybe that's because neither of them was preternaturally cute in that unsettling child-star way, where the kid's features have that ungodly, perfectly apple-cheeked aspect, as though their features were assembled in Photoshop, grafted onto organic matter, and hustled onto the set of a Welch's grape juice ad. Gosling's long face and mature smirk, and Stahl's wounded eyes and expressive brow, put them into a class apart from their wholesome, homogenized peers. The fact that they were both very talented actors, even as boys -- each more than just an unconventionally pretty face -- didn't hurt their future careers any either: for many years, Gosling and Stahl were a couple of very assured artists who also happened to be irresistible jailbait for grown-up ladies (and some grown-up dudes).

But it must be frustrating, if one is an actor mature and gifted beyond his years, not to get offered any roles that aren't (a) sweet, gentle, sensitive loners or (b) total psychos. (Or, sometimes, guys who appear to be total psychos but are actually, deep down, sensitive and misunderstood.) And here's why: most adolescent actors (or actors who play adolescents) who are generically good-looking can't really act. Look -- really look -- at any Paul Walker performance and you will see what we mean. Because they are attractive, they get to be in movies, but they don't ever get saddled with roles that are complex or challenging or require them to do much other than be easy-going or noble, and date the movie's leading lady. When it comes to teen-centric movies, the better-looking you are, the duller your role will be. Stahl and Gosling ended up playing the lovelorn, the loonies, or the loonies turned loony as a result of being lovelorn, because Ken dolls like James Marsden (who co-starred with Stahl in Disturbing Behavior, and co-stars opposite Gosling in the upcoming weepie The Notebook) aren't good for anything but unambiguous square-jaw characters.

Stahl, so far, has mostly stayed around the sensitive end of the spectrum. We first saw him as a wide-eyed kid in The Man Without A Face, befriending hideous freak Mel Gibson (who also happened to have a facial abnormality, har har). Then, as if overnight, there he was as a misguided romantic in In The Bedroom. But that's not to say he can't commit violence too -- as the titular character in Bully, for example -- though normally those characters have some sort of sympathetic background to explain their actions. Maybe he's been turned into a Stepford teenager (Disturbing Behavior), or has enlisted in the army during World War II (The Thin Red Line), or he's trying to save humans of the future from being wiped out by evil androids (Terminator 3). As for HBO's Carnivàle, it's too soon to tell whether Stahl's laconic Okie Ben is going to end up basically good and ineffectual, or basically a crazy, violent kook drunk on his mysterious healing powers. We're leaning toward the latter, if only because Carnivàle nearly drove us mad after merely watching two episodes; living it should cause all its characters to enter the nearest asylum -- specifically, to be admitted to its very most pretentious ward. Anyway: even if we don't support all of Stahl's career choices, we will maintain that he has aged into a cuter man than he was a boy; he can even get away with that floppy '20s haircut they gave him for Carnivàle, as few self-respecting men of the twenty-first century can. (Confidential to Mike Myers: You can't. Make a note.)

Then there's Ryan Gosling. Ohhhh, Ryan Gosling. How dare you be so compelling playing bad, dirty sociopaths that you can inspire in us such bad, dirty thoughts? Of all the New Mouseketeers, Gosling has arguably gone the furthest to distance himself from his squeaky-clean beginnings, playing such magnetic villains as the doomed, twisted Jewish anti-Semite in The Believer; the doomed, homoerotically charged co-killer in Murder By Numbers; and the seemingly motiveless murderer in The United States of Leland. But even as he goes to such extremes to play utterly reprehensible characters, Gosling can't help getting the audience on his side because he is just so hot. Truly, he would have chemistry with a folding chair. In Murder By Numbers, he manages to convince us that he is in love with Michael Pitt, doing his best impression of a pile of greasy rags; later, when he has to intimidate Sandra Bullock both physically and sexually, she can't quite pull off the disgust and contempt she's supposed to feel toward him, because he oozes sex appeal from every pore. (And apparently, she decided not even to try to resist those urges offscreen, despite being sixteen years his senior and, we have heard, gay.) Gosling's character is an amoral killer! He's deplorable! But we still totally want to French him! Why is he doing this to us? Thank God his next role is in the straight-ahead romantic melodrama The Notebook; its trite, predictable story may not tax his actorly gifts, but we look forward to fantasizing NC-17-rated-ly about a Gosling character who wouldn't strangle us on a passing whim. Well, fine, we look forward to fantasizing NC-17-rated-ly about a Gosling character who wouldn't strangle us on a passing whim, amidst all our filthy fantasies about the Gosling characters who would. Don't judge us.

Advantage: Gosling. How can something so wrong feel so right?