"Pomerance is the inimitable lyric poet of cinema scholars, bringing the imagination of a creative artist and the rigor of an exacting intellect to these masterly riffs on Depp’s complexities and conundrums. The protean actor could not have found a commentator more in tune with his mercurial career and elusive, mesmerizing self."—David Sterritt, author of Mad to Be Saved: The Beats, the ’50s, and Film

"Johnny Depp Starts Here offers an important contribution to the field of star studies. . . . Pomerance’s passion is highly contagious."—Michael DeAngelis, DePaul University

From beloved bad-boy to cool and captivating maverick, Johnny Depp has inspired media intrigue and has been the source of international acclaim since the early 1990s. He has attracted attention for his eccentric image, his accidental acting career, his beguiling good looks, and his quirky charm. In Johnny Depp Starts Here, film scholar Murray Pomerance explores our fascination with Depp, his riddling complexity, and his meaning for our culture. Moving beyond the actor’s engaging and inscrutable private life, Pomerance focuses on his enigmatic screen performances from A Nightmare on Elm Street to Secret Window.

The actor’s image is studied in terms of its many strange nuances: Depp’s ethnicity, his smoking, his tranquility, his unceasing motion, his links to the Gothic, the Beats, Simone de Beauvoir, the history of rationality, Impressionist painting, and other ambiguities. In a series of treatments of his key roles, including Rafael in The Brave, Bon Bon in Before Night Falls, Jack Kerouac in The Source, and the long list of acclaimed performances from Gilbert Grape to Cap’n Jack Sparrow, we learn of Johnny onscreen in terms of male sexuality, space travel, optical experience, Roland Barthes, nineteenth-century American capitalism, Orientalism, the vulnerability of performance, the perils of sleep, comedy, the myth of the West, Scrooge McDuck, François Truffaut, and more.

Both deeply intriguing and perpetually elusive, Depp is revealed as the central screen performer of the contemporary age, the symbol of performance itself.