It’s hard to tell whether the waiter recognizes him. LaBeouf is doing reshoots for this month’s Eagle Eye, directed by D.J. Caruso—it’s a highbrow thriller about two Americans framed as political assassins by a terrorist cell—so he has a little more scruff than usual, and with his cap pulled down far enough he could be any underemployed L.A. actor getting his caffeine fix. He’s wearing skinnyish black jeans, a threadbare Emerson, Lake & Palmer T-shirt, and beat-up brown Nike Cortezes. His girlish eyelashes, cheeks, and mouth are obscured by the beard and the cap, which makes him look older than he does in the YouTube video that made the rounds in the spring—the one of him drunkenly calling his friend a “faggot” and begging to be slapped in the face. But LaBeouf’s swagger—the “boss”ing and “man”ing—suggests fresh confidence, the kind that comes from having recently had your name attached to two blockbuster franchises. It also suggests some defensiveness. That “faggot” video, plus a misdemeanor arrest and a few other glancing blows this year to his still-developing image, has made him zip himself up a little tighter. While once he publicly joked about his regrettable movie choices, like Dumber and Dumberer, and break-danced with abandon for Craig Kilborn, LaBeouf is more inhibited now, more likely to use terms like role model.

Since his first major part, in Disney’s 2003 sleeper hit Holes, LaBeouf, 22, has been in some very big movies. Last summer’s Transformers grossed $700 million worldwide, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull may whip-crack past that. He’s also been in some smaller movies that outperformed expectations—last year’s teen thriller Disturbia made more than five times its $20 million budget at the box office. But he hasn’t really been the focal point of a big movie—until now. Much as Disturbia recalled Rear Window, Eagle Eye, in which LaBeouf stars opposite Michelle Monaghan, brings North by Northwest into the age of the Patriot Act. LaBeouf, who cold-called his first agent at the age of 12 and promptly nailed an audition with a Disney casting director, leans heavily on his swagger to downplay the pressure of doing a movie with a $100 million-plus budget that is executive-produced by Steven Spielberg—who has reportedly called him a young Tom Hanks. “I never chose to do this because there was meaning in it or I was talented or gave a shit about acting,” LaBeouf says. “I got into this because I was broke.”

Working actors are generally either enigmas or exhibitionists. Usually the good ones are the former and the bad ones the latter. But if you want to propel yourself from noteworthiness to superstardom, you have no choice but to sacrifice some of your mystery for relatability. George Clooney did this with his ring-a-ding-ding boys’ club; Tom Cruise does it by styling himself the village elder of Hollywood—Mr. Propriety. Demigods of the public imagination onscreen and in life, these actors are insulated from the damage that a few lackluster films—or even a box-office bomb—can do. “There’s a form of selling out,” LaBeouf says. “It’s necessary. You have to become edible for people in Texas. You have to become edible for the Christian right, for mass audiences.” Right now, he’s doing that two ways: by joining up with two tent-pole franchises—Transformers and Indy—and by micromanaging his own palatability. Being a 22-year-old kid, though, he sometimes runs into image-management problems.

Over a three-month period in the past year, LaBeouf got into a series of entanglements with the law. Last November, he walked into a Chicago Walgreens to buy cigarettes, had a drunken argument with a security guard, and was arrested for trespassing after refusing to leave the store. In February, he was cited for smoking a cigarette on public property in Burbank, California. A few weeks later an arrest warrant was issued when he failed to appear in court for that charge. “I don’t ever remember getting arrested sober. I was always arrested drunk,” he says. “It’s when I’m drinking that I don’t have the wherewithal to be able to realize the position of my life. There’s too much at stake for me to throw it away. I enjoy what I’m able to give my family. I enjoy the people that I’m able to wake up and work with. And I don’t want to throw away what I’ve worked so hard for 12 years to achieve, based on an argument that takes place in 20 minutes.” By the time LaBeouf lit out on the Indiana Jones promotional tour in the spring, the mini-scandals were regularly being used by reporters as segues into questions about his upbringing.

An only child, LaBeouf grew up poor in Echo Park, then a working-class Latino neighborhood in L.A. “None of my friends were ever as broke as I was,” he says. “That’s not some dramatic spinning of a tale—my uncle was going to adopt me at one point because my parents couldn’t afford to have me anymore. They had too much pride to go on welfare or food stamps.”

Whether it’s a dramatic spinning of a tale is beside the point; LaBeouf’s childhood has become his chosen mythology. Before the milk for his coffee has arrived, he’s run through the highlights in an uninterrupted stream: His parents sold snow cones and hot dogs in a park near their apartment while LaBeouf, in a clown costume, japed for customers; as a 12-year-old, he did X-rated stand-up in Pasadena comedy clubs; his mother, Shayna Saide, is an American-born Russian-Jewish ballerina whose mother ran with Allen Ginsberg; her mother played piano on Lucky Luciano’s gambling boat. LaBeouf says his father, a Vietnam vet named Jeffrey LaBeouf, had a heroin problem. And that in addition to being a commedia dell’arte—trained mime, he was a weed dealer who grew his crop on the sides of freeways. And that he’s credited with bringing the sinsemilla seed to Hawaii, giving a continent of thankful stoners the Thai stick. The lore cascades out of LaBeouf in unsolicited torrents—and free of taboos. “It’s just my family was raised differently,” he says. “It was never ‘Drugs!’ It was never like that for my family, which helped me because I never had a curiosity, it was never closed off. It was always out in the open and it was always explained to me. I’m so grateful for that. It’s why I never tried anything beyond marijuana or drinking. I mean, I know that I personally can’t do any of it. And so I don’t.”

“Every actor chooses their story at the beginning,” he says. “There’s this weird dichotomy of having to appear human yet be a mysterious entity in order to continue doing your craft. I need something to talk about, and then you don’t have to get into deep, personal introspection.”