'It will change your life,” his producer Jerry Bruckheimer told him last year while they were making the film Pearl Harbor. His director, Michael Bay, told him the same thing. So did his costar Ben Affleck. What they meant by “it” was: starring in a movie they hope is currently well on its way to becoming a worldwide blockbuster, a movie that will not only mint money but also latch onto the global consciousness with a death grip, dictating the dreams of ticket-buying mobs from Kansas City to Seoul to Caracas (though perhaps not Tokyo). A movie that will virtually overnight make an international movie star out of a comparative unknown—who, in this case, would be Josh Hartnett, a kid whose dark good looks are of the type usually referred to as brooding, and whose eyes, though squinty, can read on film as having profoundly soulful depths. Which is a true, inexplicable gift, like perfect pitch or the ability to multiply 13-figure sums in your head.

"He has no idea what he's in for. There'll be girls and people wanting his autograph running after him.... He's going to be really sorry."

“It will change your life.” The 22-year-old actor heard these words again and again, which must have been annoying and daunting and, of course, exhilarating. At the time, Hartnett had made a grand total of seven films, only four of which had then been released, dating back to 1998’s Halloween: H20. His agreeable performances in that film—in which he gave a flirty spin to lines such as “Run!”—and in The Faculty, another teen horror movie released the same year, prompted Seventeen magazine to name him “the unofficial Hottie of Horror,” despite the fact that he appeared in both pictures with a chunky bowl haircut out of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. To audiences above the age of 25, he was arguably best known before Pearl Harbor for his role in The Virgin Suicides, the 1999 film in which his portrayal of the coolest, cockiest, sexiest kid in a suburban high school, not to mention the way he filled out a red velvet tuxedo (the film was set in the 1970s), made him something of an arthouse pinup boy. The director, Sofia Coppola, even gave him a campy movie-star entrance, leaning him against a muscle car and slowly panning up from his black cowboy boots to his puka shells, orange-tinted aviators, and Bobby Sherman wig. On the soundtrack was Heart’s “Magic Man.” “We had to make him an icon,” says Coppola, who likens the scene to a “bad commercial.” The brilliance of Hartnett’s performance was that he played the part as if he were playing a movie star, full of vanity and fear.

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But there is stardom and then there is stardom. “What was it, the teenager movie he did?” is how Michael Bay—not the most politic of interview subjects—unintentionally up Hartnett’s career to date. Bay was the director, previously, of such blockbusters as Armageddon and The Rock, movies that look like good, slick, very expensive commercials. His Pearl Harbor is a wartime epic, as hokey as it is spectacular, with an original price tag of $135 million—the highest budgeted-for budget in movie history. It aims to be Titanic with Japanese Zeros taking the place of the iceberg: Hartnett’s and Affleck’s characters, childhood friends and fellow fighter pilots, are caught up in a tragic love triangle with a navy nurse played by the English actress Kate Beckinsale. The film, which also stars Cuba Gooding Jr. and Alec Baldwin, was released by Disney’s Touchstone Pictures on Memorial Day weekend; if all goes according to plan, by the Fourth of July, Josh Hartnett will be a product-moving, culture-bridging heartthrob on the order of Leonardo DiCaprio, or thereabouts.

"I never really understood how the movie stars would do their charismatic thing, and people definitely tried to teach me."

“I guarantee you this kid will be a movie star with this movie,” Bay told me before its release. One should note that he had a vested interest in saying so, but also that if he didn’t believe it to be true he wouldn’t have hired Hartnett in the first place. According to one source, the actor tested higher with preview audiences—particularly girls— than any of his co-stars. Perhaps this is partly because in Pearl Harbor he finally has a decent haircut. Unfortunately, neither he nor the rest of the cast have much in the way of characters to play: more telegraphed than written, the romantic story line lacks even the pulpy energy that made Titanic work. But, when not overshadowed by the hunks of exploding battleship and fighter plane that continually fly toward the camera, Hartnett finds what humanity he can playing the part Ronald Reagan would have once played. He doesn’t grab the audience so much as draw it in, a welcome pool of stillness amid the expert whizzing and smashing and flying apart.

“There’s a sensitivity about him, and a nobility,” says Jerry Bruckheimer, who doesn’t do Hartnett any favors by likening him to a cross between Gary Cooper and Montgomery Clift. Some burden, that. “I kept telling him,” the producer continues, “ ‘When this movie comes out, it will change your life.’ He said, ‘I know, I know.’ But he doesn’t really know. He has no idea what he’s in for.... There’ll be girls and people wanting his autograph running after him. I remember once with Cruise”—Tom Cruise, who starred in Top Gun and Days of Thunder for Bruckheimer—“we went to a movie in Westwood, the two of us, and I’m telling you, there was a throng of people that were chasing him. It was unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything like it. We had to duck and hide in a parking lot. It gets scary. That’s going to happen to Josh. He’s going to be really sorry,” Bruckheimer adds with refreshing honesty, given that he makes a living putting people in that position.

“I remember what the tidal wave of publicity that accompanied Good Will Hunting did to my life,” writes Ben Affleck via E-mail. “Simply put, Josh will get very famous very quickly and runs the very real risk of becoming a sort of one-man embodiment of the Backstreet Boys to hormone-crazed 15-year-old girls from Minnetonka to Tarzana. He is particularly at risk for this as he is so very PRETTY. I suspect he’ll find the prospect of this (as well as that of becoming a pinup in prison cells everywhere—which is, I’d say, the ‘downside’) somewhat overwhelming. It’s great and heady, but a little weird to say the least.”

For good or ill, hormone-crazed girls were in short supply this spring in Morocco, where Hartnett had gone to shoot Black Hawk Down for director Ridley Scott. Based on the book by the journalist Mark Bowden, the film will recount the 15-hour battle that took place in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 after several units of elite U.S. troops attempted to capture aides to a warlord who had run afoul of the U.N. Pinned down by militiamen, the Americans suffered 18 dead and more than 70 wounded; three American corpses were dragged through the city’s dusty streets, images that were replayed endlessly on CNN. (Lest we forget, hundreds of Somalians were also killed.) If the film is faithful to Bowden’s gruesome, minute-by-minute account of the battle, it will be something like the 25-minute D-day sequence in Saving Private Ryan expanded to feature length and well-nigh unendurable. Bruckheimer is producing this one, too.

Hartnett, who is rumored to be getting $2 million for the role, and who may soon be known as the John Wayne of U.S. military debacles, plays a staff sergeant whose men number among the battle’s first casualties. His co-stars include Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore, and Jason Isaacs. On this sunny, temperate morning, they and 50 or so of their fellow cast members—a young, spirited group that includes Americans, Britons, Australians, Frenchmen, and at least one Dane— have gathered at one of the production’s locations to rehearse some of the military maneuvers they will have to execute on film. The coastal city of Sale, which sits across an estuary from the Moroccan capital, Rabat, and which appears to have somewhat the same relationship to its sister municipality that Newark does to New York, is filling in for Mogadishu. It is a depressed-looking city of squalid markets, crumbling, low-rise concrete apartment buildings, and litter. Even the boho Lonely Planet guide dismisses it as “pretty grubby and worn out.”

Four blocks have been cordoned off. As small crowds of Moroccan boys and men watch from behind the barriers, and neighborhood dogs roam the set barking at nothing in particular, the actors, all dressed in fatigues, dash about with plastic rifles pretending to “secure a perimeter.” Others, including Hartnett, are jumping off the fourth-floor landing of an unfinished cinder-block apartment building, grabbing onto a thick nylon rope (which hangs from rigging suspended between two open floors), and then slithering to earth as if sliding down a wobbly fire pole. This last exercise doesn’t look entirely safe; you’d think the limbs and spinal columns of million-dollar movie stars would rate more protection than the couple of thin mats placed on the ground below. But all this playing armyman seems designed, in part, to foster old-fashioned military esprit. Technical advisers—ex-soldiers and navy SEALS—put the actors through their paces and occasionally bark out halfhearted boot-camp threats along the lines of “From now on, you’re eating shit together,” and “You’re in a shitstorm of trouble,” and “I’m going to put you in a world of shit.”

“We’re on top of the world,” Hartnett yells in response, the faux exhilaration in his voice indicating that this is to be taken ironically. But with Pearl Harbor’s release still months away, and the actor free to enjoy the promise of fame with little of the “downside” (he’s been in the country for five days and been recognized only once, he says, by “a couple of French girls”)—not to mention the fact that he’s now working with a director who, in the wake of Gladiator and Hannibal, is probably second only to Steven Spielberg on industry A-lists—Hartnett is on top of the world. It must at least feel that way.

“Then I’m going to put you ‘on top’ of a world of shit,” says the technical adviser, returning the discussion to excrement while inadvertently offering a nifty definition of fame.

That is the topography Hartnett will soon have to navigate. Already he seems to be adjusting to the subtle pecking order that inflects the camaraderie on the Black Hawk Down set. As rehearsals end, a couple of other actors hitch a ride back to the Rabat Hilton with Josh, his car, and his driver; almost everyone else is ferried to and fro in vans. (The hotel’s lobby these days presents a curious mix of Japanese businessmen and what looks to be a bivouacing platoon of unusually photogenic soldiers.) En route, the conversation turns to the possibility of a Screen Actors Guild strike, a serious checkbook issue for many performers, and then to the question of whether working continuously is bad from a purely creative standpoint. “I want to keep big gaps between projects,” says Hartnett, who, it appears, is already thinking about rationing himself. There’s a brief moment of silence in the car as everyone drinks this in, including Josh. He looks out the window. “Of course,” he adds, a little chagrined, “I’m grateful to be in that position.”

ALMOST FAMOUS Hartnett, still able to walk the streets of Morocco unrecognized, not far from the location where his film Black Hawk Down is being shot.

'He wants to be a star, like anybody would, but he also recognizes that there’s something detaching and something potentially very destructive about that,” says Michael Lehmann, the director of 40 Days and 40 Nights, a comedy about a man who gives up sex for Lent which Hartnett filmed immediately after finishing Pearl Harbor and which will be released this fall. “There’s a genuine streak in Josh that’s ambivalent about fame,” says the film’s producer, Michael London. “He wants it, he can sort of taste it, he’s just trying to figure out if there’s a way to have it on his own terms. He’s still figuring out who he is and what it’s all about. He’s just—he’s young."

It’s true. “You really gotta know your shit,” Hartnett says of working with Ridley Scott, then quickly adds, “I’m swearing a lot—my grandma’s gonna kill me.” Certainly you wouldn’t expect to hear that out of Mickey Rourke’s mouth. Hartnett smokes a little, but his main actorly affectation is a Michael Nesmith-style wool cap he wears everywhere and which makes him look even younger than he is—a freshman at Bard, say, on his first visit to the Village. Other than that, he seems unusually comfortable in his own skin for someone of his age and profession. He’s from Minnesota, people say by way of explanation.

Colleagues portray an actor who is dedicated, scrupulous, unfailingly polite, and occasionally stubborn (in a good way, they insist). Searching for insight into his Virgin Suicides character he sought out not the screenwriter—that would have already been way beyond the call of duty—but the novelist on whose book the film was based. “It was clear he had given a lot of thought to the part,” says the author, Jeffrey Eugenides, who met Hartnett in a bar while the film was being shot in Toronto. “He wasn’t taking the thing lightly, and it was gratifying to have one of the actors invest me with the kind of importance, well, the kind of importance writers of novels wish to have over films of their novels. Josh’s concentration was also impressive in light of the two dozen or so women who were trying to get his attention while we were talking.”

“He’s earth-shatteringly handsome in a slightly surprised way—he can’t quite believe when everyone is falling over him and teasing him about being so good-looking. He takes all of that very well,” says Kate Beckinsale. During the filming of Pearl Harbor, she often brought her one-year-old daughter, Lily, to the set; for one of those arbitrary reasons known only to toddlers, Hartnett’s presence upset her. “We all used to tease him that it was because he was so handsome and she couldn’t handle it. He worked on her though, and she caved in the end. I think they all probably do.” (On that score, Hartnett has reportedly dated, among others, the model Gisele Bündchen and the actress Monet Mazur.)

By most accounts, including his own, he doesn’t party much. To the extent that he lives anywhere—he’s basically been moving from one location to another over the past four years, and his possessions are in storage—he beds down in his “hippie-ish” parents’ house in St. Paul, Minnesota. (Dad was a guitar player for Al Green before taking over a family real-estate business.) To date, Josh’s big movie-star splurge has been buying a not particularly sexy Audi A4. “I was going to get a Volkswagen and I saw the Audi and I said, ‘What’s this money for?' " The car he says he really covets is an even less sexy Toyota Land Cruiser: “It’s just this big box on wheels. It looks like a really big, wedgy mail truck.” And that attracts him? “It’s just a cool truck. And it’s got so much power to it I could drag my house along if I really ever wanted to get a house.”

It will probably not come as a surprise to learn that his favorite writers are the Beats— “my biggest influence when I was a kid,” he explains with disarming, age-appropriate earnestness. “The only time I saw Josh really light up,” says Michael London, was when Lawrence Ferlinghetti visited 40 Days and 40 Nights’ San Francisco set.

Just a few years ago, Hartnett was on the other end of the pipeline, working in a video store. “I’d take home like three or four films a night and at least start them,” he remembers. “When you work in a video store, you go, That sucks, that sucks, that sucks, that’s good, that’s not really my taste.’ You see so many. Then when you’ve been in it and you start working on them you realize, ‘God, it’s hard to make a really brilliant film. It’s almost near impossible.’” Unlike a lot of actors, he can at least articulate what makes a movie brilliant. Here, for instance, is his take on the scene in The Godfather where Carlo, the brother-in-law, is garroted in the front seat of a sedan: “The shot of his foot coming through the windshield, it’s so jarring because the movie at that point has been so quiet. Even the killing is quiet. And then boom!—kick in the windshield. That sums it up, and you don’t need to see the strangulation as much as you need to see his feet go through the windshield.” How many actors do you know who understand economy? Perhaps Hartnett’s production company— he’s already set one up—will actually amount to something.

When people in the industry talk about what separates genuine movie stars—the Tom Cruises and Julia Robertses—from the general run of actors, they invariably mention not only great looks, suitable roles, and “serious acting chops,” but also a certain ill-defined and poorly understood “it’’—industry shorthand for the way people such as Cruise and Roberts appear on film as if lit from within. Perhaps they emit gamma rays through their teeth; no one really knows. “There’s this presence movie stars command on the screen,” says Michael Bay. “You can’t sometimes see it in the room, but when it’s on film, it just has this power. It’s like magic.” Whether or not Hartnett has it, he certainly has something. As he runs through the military exercises in Sale, there’s a precision to his movements that singles him out from his fellow “soldiers,” a heightened articulation as he sidles warily into an empty room and sweeps it with his plastic rifle; he “clears a room of hostiles” the way Baryshnikov would.

But getting back to what people say about movie stars, a caveat is generally offered about their looks. Movie stars are supposed to be gorgeous but not excessively gorgeous. If their looks were blandly perfect, they’d be on soaps or, in the case of women, dating Hugh Hefner. It’s as if a minor flaw or two— Clark Gable’s jug ears would be the classic example—are just enough to give the camera traction, to allow a face to fill a big screen and hold our interest over the course of not just a couple of hours but a career. In this sense, Hartnett is blessed with a slightly simian set to his face and a winning gap between his front teeth. He’s got a square jaw and broad shoulders, but he’s also stoop-shouldered, slightly hollow-chested, and anemically whiskered—a fusion of hunky and motherable. And then there are those eyes, as narrow as Clint Eastwood’s yet nearly as expressive as Lillian Gish’s. In last year’s otherwise awful Here on Earth, a teen romance in which Hartnett, saddled with yet another chunky bowl haircut, played a farm boy who loses Leelee Sobieski to a callous preppy played by Chris Klein (Sobieski’s character then dies of knee cancer), Hartnett’s scenes consisted almost entirely of reaction shots in which his eyes revealed reservoirs of pain so unwarranted by the script, and by the clumsy performances around him, that you may have felt moved in violation of all normal laws of moviegoing. Which is certainly one kind of it.

STAR ON THE HORIZON “There’s a genuine streak in Josh that's ambivalent about fame,” says producer Michael London. “He’s still figuring out who he is and what it’s all about. He’s just—he’s young.”

Hartnett got his first taste of being in front of an audience during grade school, as an altar boy. “Me and my friends used to serve every funeral because we’d get five bucks and we could get out of school. They’d treat it like it was an inconvenience for us. Right. We were like, ‘Five bucks, get out of school? It’s too bad these people had to die, but they did die, why don’t we serve?’ ” Aside from a couple of junior-high-school plays, he began his formal career as an actor at the age of 16 after a knee injury forced him off the football team. Overcoming his suspicion that the stage was for “sissies,” he tried out for a children’s-theater production of Tom Sawyer and got the part of Huck Finn. A local talent booker subsequently noticed him as Sky Masterson during a highschool Guys and Dolls, passed him a card, and immediately after Josh graduated in 1996, he was doing TV commercials and had a manager, Nancy Kremer, who at the time specialized in funneling kids from Minnesota to Hollywood.

“I thought it was going to be this big picturesque Hollywood scene,” Hartnett remembers of his greenhorn days. “I thought it was a bunch of guys in slouch hats carrying big planks, building sets, and singing, ‘Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go.’ I thought it was all going to be a community. I thought all the studios were right next to each other.” Needless to say, they aren’t. But disappointing as that may have been for him to discover, Hartnett’s story is remarkable for its lack of Day of the Locust-style humiliations—no roach-infested Gower Gulch apartments, or appearances in porno movies that aren’t as obscure as their now bankable performers might hope. Even before Hartnett arrived in Hollywood in early 1997, the head of casting at the WB network had seen an audition tape and, according to Kremer, put “dibs” on him. (He was almost cast in Dawson’s Creek.) The day after Kremer picked him up at LAX he signed with an agent and was soon going out on four auditions a day. (Four a week would be considered good.) “The thing is,” says Kremer, “when he went out, every single call, he got a callback on, which is pretty much unheard of. And on top of that, casting directors were calling other casting directors telling them that they should meet him. That’s a huge buzz you can’t buy in Hollywood. That’s just a gift from the heavens.”

Hartnett did miss out on being cast in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, one of his very first auditions, but within two months of going to Los Angeles he landed a part in the ABC crime series Cracker. Unfortunately, it was programmed on Thursday nights against the final season of Seinfeld. Nine episodes later, Hartnett was freed to work in films, where his hot streak continued. Sofia Coppola cast him in The Virgin Suicides without even meeting him, having seen him only on tape. “You just knew he had it,” she says. The only real glitch in Hartnett’s career has been that he won parts in two consecutive films that would become, as journalists like to say, “troubled”: Town and Country, the choppy, painfully unfunny divorce comedy that finally made it into theaters last month after having seen its release date pushed back at least 12 times and its budget balloon to more than $80 million (Hartnett, probably to his benefit, barely registers in a handful of scenes as Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton’s son); and O, the so-called “Othello in a high school,” which Miramax’s Dimension Films has put on hold for almost two years, fearing that the film’s violence would prove bothersome to senators and pressure groups (Hartnett plays the Iago character, “Hugo,” to Mekhi Phifer’s “Odin”). Lions Gate Films, which previously took Dogma off Miramax’s hands, acquired O this spring and plans to release it in August. It’s a strange, uneven movie with powerful performances—especially Hartnett’s portrait of haunted malevolence—which almost makes its reductive conceits work.

Though no one forced him to pursue the part in Pearl Harbor and submit to a screen test for Bay, Hartnett says he almost turned the role down because he was “scared of fame, really.” At the time, he was slated to do Get Over It, a teen romance with Kirsten Dunst, for Miramax; after what some have characterized as difficult negotiations, the company released Hartnett while retaining an option for another film with the actor. It is a measure of his perceived allure at the box office that people at Miramax feel Get Over It, which flopped this spring, suffered for his absence.

He didn’t take naturally to the more succinct and iconic sort of performance demanded by Pearl Harbor, a film in which he was lit like a Lexus and often had to act opposite explosions. “There were very specific things they wanted for my character,” he says. “A movie like Pearl Harbor, they want it simple in a lot of ways. The plot can be a little more complex if you know the characters right off the bat. My job was to make the character as complex as possible within that simplicity.” He mentions a scene with Kate Beckinsale that wasn’t “exploding on the screen the way they wanted it to. So Michael was like, ‘Smile. Come on. Smile!’ He showed it to me a few times [on the monitor] and I was like, ‘Yeah, you’re right, I should smile more.’ But it was one of those directions that, as an actor, you go, ‘How does that work for me as the character? I can’t just go out there and smile.’ So it was pretty frustrating.” Bay joked on the set that if he could capture just one megawatt grin from Hartnett, whose smiles tend toward the wry and close-lipped, he would paste it throughout the rest of the film digitally. “I never really understood how the movie stars would do their charismatic thing,” Hartnett says, “and they definitely tried to teach me.” They also knew what they were doing: Hartnett’s initial flirtation with Beckinsale is his best scene in the film.

Michael London, the producer of 40 Days and 40 Nights, was an executive at Twentieth Century Fox in 1990 when the studio was making Sleeping with the Enemy, with Julia Roberts; her previous film, Pretty Woman, was released in the middle of the shoot. “When we started,” London says, “she was just an actor that we cast. They probably paid her $500,000. And when Sleeping with the Enemy finished, she was on the cover of People magazine and Rolling Stone and everything. It was like watching stardom happen in slow motion. And the same thing we could feel happening with Josh, even though Josh, in the outside world, isn’t Julia Roberts or Tom Cruise yet. But because of Pearl Harbor and because of the buzz, you could feel the sands shifting and this enormous kind of personality being born. It’s a weird thing to watch, you know. It’s both really kind of wonderful and also sort of frightening, because you can see the person wondering where they end and the stardom begins.”

“There are so many times when people are anointed the next movie star,” says Michael Bay, “and they lose it. They lose it because they make the wrong choices. And it’s a business that’s pretty unforgiving.” As it happens, 40 Days and 40 Nights represents a particular risk for Hartnett, since it will be both the first film he truly has to carry and his first stab at a romantic comedy.

For his part, Hartnett sloughs off career concerns with a young actor’s requisite take-it-or-leave-it shrug: “Personally, I don’t care as long as I’m making enough to eat.” But stardom seems to be weighing on Hartnett’s mind one evening at the Rabat Hilton, where it happens to be karaoke night in the bar. A dozen or so of the other Black Hawk Down cast members—average age must be around 21—are having a boisterous good time. Given that there are virtually no women in the cast, and that a Muslim country isn’t the best place to pick up locals, there is a lot of excess energy, both generically masculine and specifically thespian, craving an outlet. Funny dance moves and comic pantomimed sodomy ensue—it’s as if everyone were the star of his own movie. The non-actors in the bar aren’t sure how to take all this, though they do enjoy one fellow’s flawless rendition of Bryan Adams’s “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You.”

Hartnett is in the back of the room with his wool cap pulled over his head, slouching on a love seat and quietly nursing a beer. He’s talking about one of his better-known co-stars from an earlier film: “He’s self-deprecating, but he’s also got a huge ego. That’s why he’s so funny. It’s that combination of the two.” Hartnett mulls this insight over for a moment while a Moroccan man murders “La Bamba,” then continues: “That’s the thing about real movie stars that I’ll never have. When real movie stars walk into a room, it’s all about them. They know it and everybody else knows it. I like to fly under the radar. I try, anyway.”