As night winds down on the set, a camera truck lumbers up, festooned with pipes and crowded with crewmen. Behind it is the ambulance. Scorsese is visible in the back, his features half-lit by the video monitor that's inches from his face. Dawn is creeping in beyond the East River; the company is about to lose the nighttime, and Cage, pretty expert in vampire lore, looks uneasy. "We've been in this 'bus,' going around in circles, living by night, for six months now," he says. Cage pauses while a makeup artist does a moment's brushwork near his eyes. "When I head home," he adds, "I see people out there getting their coffee and bran muffin to start their day, and I'm terrified."

There's no Hollywood hunk worth his salt who will miss a chance to tell you how he seeks the "vulnerability" in his characters. You generally won't hear the v-word from Cage, who is meticulous in his choice of language and shreds most Hollywood cliches before they can travel from brain to lips. And yet he's got it, plentifully; rather than manufacture vulnerability, Cage shows his craft in how he controls and apportions his own ever-present natural supply. Such translucent work might not be surprising if Cage's career had stayed at the edge of the frame, a succession of gimps and yahoos, as some thought it would. But Cage is a sought-after marquee name, and, not so parenthetically, an action star. What long ago was the news about Cage -- that he was the maverick offshoot of a film dynasty -- has become simply part of the small pri nt in the course of many retellings.

Raised on the middle-class fringe of Beverly Hills, Nic and older brothers Chris and Marc lived through some difficult years when their mother, Joy Vogelsang, was institutionalized and their father, academician August Coppola, sent them to live for a time with his brother Francis. Cage remembers feeling like a poor relation during visits with his rich and famous uncle. He became fascinated by the marionette Pinocchio and comic books, and only tolerated school for the chance to step onstage in drama class (in Oklahoma! among other shows).

Nic hated high school, didn't like taking the bus and walking through a parking lot full of posh German iron that the richer boys drove on dates with girls who had no time for him. Does he ever feel like cruising the place in his black Bentley, or maybe the Lamborghini? "The only thing that I would say to you is that I don't drive past there," says Cage. "I just never was a high school guy, but..." -- here he laughs as a better memory arises -- "definitely an elementary-school delinquent." He skipped part of his senior year in favor of a high school equivalency exam and began a career in earnest, onstage in a Clifford Odets play with a respectable San Francisco repertory company. He surprised his family when he won a part in a teen beach soap opera called The Best of Times, was billed as Nicolas Coppola for a small part in 1982's Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and then won roles in his uncle's Rumble Fish an d Martha Coolidge's Valley Girl. It was just before his breakthrough year of 1983 that he fibbed to his father that he, Nic, was in fact the singer on the Joe Jackson hit "Is She Really Going Out With Him?"

"Oh, God, yeah," Cage now recalls. "The interesting thing is, he bought it. I'm kind of proud of that one." Cage watched with empathy as Uncle Francis bankrupted his own Zoetrope company in making the Vegas fantasy One From the Heart. Both Cage and his uncle would see hard times on Coppola's 1984 alleged comeback, The Cotton Club, a music-stoked gangster extravaganza in which Cage's Mad Dog Dwyer character was fifteenth banana. Avid to fully inhabit a killer's persona and frustrated with endless waits on set to do his few scenes, he talked trash and, one frenzied day, tore up his trailer. After that, "My name in Manhattan was really worth mud. I really made quite a little reputation for myself on that set, trying to live the part. It took me years to get to a point where New Yorkers in the film industry would want to work with me again. I have to say, both my uncle and my father seemed amazingly patient with my shenanigans, so to speak, as an actor."

Indeed. Alongside Sean Penn in Racing With the Moon, he began rebuilding his resume. Then, on Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married, he virtually tore it up. "Remember, film is a permanent record," co-star Kathleen Turner warned him as he played the part of Charlie Bodell in a voice like Pokey, the clay horse on The Gumby Show.

I have actually heard Francis say that that character has become a standout performance," says Cage. "I don't think he regrets it at all. When I look at retrospectives and that character comes on, it really lifts, you know, the mood of the audience. Part of me would like to somehow get back to that kind of- recklessness. I think I got to do a little of that with Marty; Frank Pierce knows people are afraid of him, and he's also a little worried that he's losing control. He doesn't want people to really know too much. But every now and then he'll let the insane guy out of the bag."

Cage himself let loose one day on the set of Norman Jewison's Moonstruck when actress Julie Bovasso -- who had a small role in the film -- sought to direct him. "She was saying, 'Come on, loud and fast, that's how you do it, loud and fast.' And I was doing it very sotto voce, taking my time with it. I believe that there's only one director on the set, and I got mad. I threw a chair and I said, 'Don't you dare tell me how to act!' I did apologize later. And after that, she was very sweet about it."

Distressed to see his performance chopped down in the cutting room Jewison said he was in danger of dominating the film -- Cage waited a year before taking on the "angry little avant-garde" Vampire's Kiss, as a literary agent with the voice of an old film diva and a taste for blood. He needed to prove he could still pursue his own acting muse. "My truest public is a small fan base that has been with me since Vampire's Kiss," says Cage. "There has always been a handful of people who supported what I was doing and kept me going. I think those people still kind of got into it when I was doing more mainstream fare as well, because if they look at Vampire's Kiss, they will see a lot of what later was Face/Off in that performance. I love the ease of Jimmy Stewart, Marcello Mastroianni -- but we don't always have to be so serious about being a man."

Though there would be missteps like Fire Birds, an action picture that Cage did to pay off bills on his new enthusiasm for real estate -- he had turned a corner and become a significant actor, a fact validated by his Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas. The role of Ben Sanderson was a dark immersion that was nonetheless brilliant for its goofy comic touches, and one he specifically sought to avoid in playing the quietly hard-drinking Frank Pierce. "I didn't want there to be parallels between Frank and Ben in any way," says Cage. "The comparison that I will make is that I think Ben was actually a happier person than Frank. Ben is tortured as well, but he's cut loose from his torturer in the last four weeks of his life, whereas Frank is still trying to find some salvation, has this need to save people."

With typical contrariness, Cage set the Oscar on a shelf and plunged into the world of big-budget blow-it-up extravaganzas produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. He began with the role of offbeat FBI agent-biochemist Stanley Goodspeed in The Rock and quickly moved along to playing the alarmingly hirsute badder-than-the-baddest Cameron Poe in Con Air. These two actioners have teamed with the psychologically twisted Face/ Off to establish a new film-star persona for Cage: a box-office battering ram who also will make the occasional smaller picture. Cage sees his varied choices as "having to do, a lot, with times of pessimism and optimism. I remember going through that phase where I did not want to do any dark movies, just do romantic comedies and have light, bright, shiny-penny movies. That came from a real place.

"Recently I was at an amusement park in Santa Cruz, getting on a roller coaster, and I heard someone say, 'Here comes the bad guy.' I just thought about it: 'Now I'm the bad guy?' OK, maybe they just saw some of Face/Off, didn't see City of Angels, but somehow I've emerged as the bad guy. It would be very easy for me to fall into a slot where I would be very comfortable making movies that were consistently dark and in which I was consistently playing the bad guy. Very easy, and quite fun. Probably the easiest thing for me to do is to convey that darkness. But I don't think any of the people I work with, my colleagues, really want me exploring that too much. Because I can get trapped in the darker stuff."

Cage makes no apologies for going the blockbuster route. "I have always wanted to make action movies," he says. "As a kid, I was drawn to fast cars and Evel Knievel and motorcycles. I still am. It's a sincere expression on some level, on some part of my personality." But what of Cage's sometime pal and acting partner Sean Penn, who told the New York Times Magazine, "Nic Cage is no longer an actor. He could be again, but now he's more like a ... performer"?

Cage heaves a long sigh and seems to debate making any response. "Well," he says finally, "I was a bit: surprised, because we had gotten to know each other pretty well, and I thought there was mutual respect there. And I could make a critique of his work. But I'm not going to. I wish him well." Cage pauses before making his point: "A sellout I've heard that word -- is only a sellout if you're being paid to do something you don't want to do. I want to make these movies. I like working with Bruckheimer. I like the work we've done together."

The mobile army that's making the Jerry Bruckheimer production Gone in Sixty Seconds has taken over several city blocks in downtown Los Angeles for a car chase that will feature a passel of LAPD "black and whites" pursuing Cage's character, with lots of burning rubber and a cop car T-boning a city bus. Among the stuntmen getting ready to scatter is an older gent, Ted White, who used to double for John Wayne, and a few people costumed as down-and-outers.

Seconds later, the star himself arrives as if on a chariot, in the driver's seat of a vintage gray Mustang GT 500. Cage rides in being towed by a camera car. He's barely visible in there behind rails and racks and camera and lights all bolted and duct-taped together.

The actor smiles at the skewed deja vu of it all; for our previous meeting, on the New York set of Bringing Out the Dead, he was likewise encaged. Now he's traded in ambulance drabs for a slick and scruffy look in black leather jacket and motorcycle boots. Cage is playing Memphis, a hood (a heartwarming one, of course) who must steal fifty cars in twenty-four hours to keep his younger brother (Giovanni Ribisi) safe from some real hoodlums he owes money to.

For a number of chase scenes in this film, Cage has been doing the driving. "That takes a lot of concentration, because you never know when you can shoot past a mark or spin out or hit something or somebody," says Cage. "They put me in stunt-driving school for a couple of days, which, to be honest, I didn't enjoy. I don't like peeling out, burning rubber, doing 360s and 180s. But I do like race-car driving- what happens when you hit an apex and come out of the apex of a curve. I've had one person tell me I don't have much natural ability, but Bobby Carradine, who now considers himself a driver first and an actor second, told me I have quite a bit."

One day not long ago, says Carradine, on Willow Springs racetrack in the California desert, in Cage's own F-40 Ferrari, "we had a little christening out on Turn Nine, a big, nasty spinout." When the dust cleared, Cage was still perfectly game. When Cage turned up for a lesson one day, he told Carradine, "There are some heavy things happening right now, but I'm glad to be here, 'cause that all goes by the wayside." Cage got so good so fast, says Carradine, that within four days "he was already at that stage where drivers can hurt themselves. He'd hit a couple of turns absolutely perfectly -- about nine-tenths of what would be the maximum braking points, and the next step is eleven-tenths, and you don't always get away with that. And I said, 'Don't get ****y.'

"Nic pulled over and said, 'I'm stopping the car. Do you know why? I really don't like being talked to like that.' I apologized, and we worked it out right there. As his teacher, I had to make sure my charge understood who was master and who was in charge. So I gave him the Ride. And he was quiet during it, and afterward he said, 'I wasn't that comfortable with the out-of-control part.' And I told him, 'There's always gonna come a time when you have to go out yourself. For you, that time is now. Promise me you will not go off the road.' And he was absolutely perfect, heel-toe control, impeccable racing lines through the corners. He's got a touch only a few guys have got. What I love and I know he loves about racing is, you can't fake it. I don't see a limit for him."

Cage makes a practice of avoiding the sting of birthdays by running the clock still faster. "When I turn forty, I will have already been forty in my mind for a couple of years, probably," he says. "Forty for me will -- like I have a choice in the matter -- be acceptable. There's a few things I want to accomplish in the five years before. One thing is, I want to become a really good driver."

Meanwhile, for today he's being hauled down a long alleyway in the position, always vaguely comical, of a man who must appear to be driving all-out. It's not like a real day job, he admits: "Hey, I come from Long Beach, California. I always just wanted to be in American muscle cars, you know, going fast."

"Nic is kind of a man-child," says Bruckheimer, who fought initial studio resistance to cast Cage in The Rock and now happily pays the heavily boosted salary that the newfound action star can demand. "He is a little kid inside, and yet he's an adult, an actor and a father. He has a great way of blocking things out if there is something wrong. I mean, we all go through problems. But we don't have to stand in front of the camera and be somebody else."