About three years ago, I met 20-year-old Shia LaBeouf just as he was busy kicking off his “getting to know me” tour for the film Disturbia. Most folks didn’t yet know who he was, though many people thought he looked familiar. He and I met in the bar of the Driskill Hotel here in Austin, Texas, and we instantly got along. He, a longtime reader of Ain’t it Cool News (a website I’ve written for for almost a decade), was as familiar with my work as I was with his, so we got into it right away. Turns out we had a lot in common and spent the better part of an hour just talking geek stuff. When several members of his party decided it was time to strike out on a Sixth Street pub crawl, he leaned over and said, “Why don’t you join us? This’ll be fun.”

It was. He had a fake ID that a propmaster had made for him that was indistinguishable from the real thing (this was a year or so before his well-documented public incidents), and when he was surrounded by people more than 10 years his senior, nobody would think to question it. So we toured from pub to pub, club to club, talking movies, comic books, and women until we ended up drunkenly yelling at each other outside of a hotel, arguing over who got it worse it terms of Internet comments and how best to go about ignoring that criticism. This last part was probably the most telling thing I learned about Shia that night. Coupled with a number of stories he had told, from upcoming casting rumors he’d asked me to keep under my hat to his feelings on films he’d already made, I got the impression that Shia was intently focused upon getting it right. It wasn’t about being famous or dating starlets or getting his picture taken. He loved movies and wanted nothing more than to make really good ones. So when he was party to getting it wrong, it messed with him.

Shia reads everything. Odds are if you’ve ever written anything about him in a story or as a comment, he’s probably read it. I’m not talking about in a self-glorifying, loving the sound of your own name kind of way. I’m talking about the criticism. His manager confided to me that night how hard it is some days to get Shia focused away from the Internet and its harsh take on him. And his feelings for his projects and the movie classics that have defined our generations are just as passionate as those of any of you reading this article now — if not more so. So when I read that Shia is now openly talking about what went wrong with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or Transformers 2, what surprises me isn’t what he’s said, but how shocked everyone is about it.

This is who Shia appears to be. He’s deeply critical of his own work and unafraid to criticize the filmmakers he considers friends. After all, what kind of friend keeps that criticism under wraps? Spielberg and Bay can take it. It’s not like he’s pointing out that the emperor wears no clothes — these films are widely regarded to be bad or at the very least flawed and the reasons why are well documented. He’s openly discussing the problems, reassuring the public and the press (who are eager to think the magic is over) that everyone is well aware of what went wrong and that he fully intends to do better. Note the self-deprecating criticism inherent in every criticism of his friends’ work. He takes the blame in a very Clooney-esque sort of way.

My clearest memory of Shia is a single moment from that night, the moment his work in Constantine came up. His eyes grew wide, he shook his head quickly, and I got an honest-to-god, LeBeouf-patented nononononononononono! He quickly explained to me that he’d taken that job when he was a kid and hadn’t read the comic. All he’d known about the project was that it was a Joel Silver-produced, Keanu Reeves comic book movie. No one told him the character he was playing was 30 years old in the comic book. It would be the last time he’d make that mistake. He’s a guy who understands the fans because he IS one of the fans, and he seems to think the worst sin an artist can commit is disappointing the fans. So he’s letting the audience know that he’s disappointed, too, and he wants to do better.

Personally, I think letting this Shia out of the box is a stroke of PR brilliance. While he has a few high-profile projects under his belt, he’s been dancing on the edge of irrelevancy lately. The people who hate him aren’t so interested anymore and the people who love him aren’t getting as excited about his work. He needed to reinsert himself into the conversation — and he did so perfectly, earning the respect of an audience who wanted to think he was just another kid taking paychecks. I’m very curious to see what happens to this Shia now that he’s been let out to play. Will it lead to better films, an admission of failure from some of the offending directors, or will it just make it harder for Shia to find work?

Tags: indiana jones, oliver stone, shia labeouf