After a long and lonely 18 months in the cinematic wilderness, the movie messiah has returned. Lions for Lambs, his first outing since Mission: Impossible III in summer last year delivers that familiar brand of intense stares, dazzling smiles, piercingly precise delivery and cocksure demeanour to let us know one thing above all else – Tom Cruise is back.

At The Times BFI London Film Festival last month, where the film received its world premiere, Cruise did his customary walkabout, 100 megawatt smile on full beam for the cameraphone-wielding crowds. He knows how to work them, even when sporting a dodgy new hairdo for a new Nazi-themed movie.

But what standing does Cruise have now? Is he still the box-office behemoth? Is he the 45-year-old A-list actor with artistic pretensions and a driving need to push and poke his own persona? Or is he the pilloried media wacko, bouncing back from the ignominy of Oprah’s couch and into the serious spotlight as an industry mogul and power-house boss of his newly purchased United Artists studio? Or all, or none, of the above?

A hint of an answer can be gleaned, perhaps, from Cruise’s turn in Lions for Lambs, in which he plays a high-ranking Republican senator with presidential ambitions. It’s a solid, statesmanlike role in a film that seeks to interrogate – very wordily and worthily – current issues around war and conflict.

Lions is all the more interesting because Cruise not only plays a lead role but is also the movie’s executive producer. Even more significantly, the film is the debut project from Cruise’s revamped United Artists – and thus something of a reassuring statement to Cruise-watchers, especially to those within the industry.

Early reviews have not been positive. Variety said there was “no real human drama to buttress the moral-political conflict”, and that the “star-heavy discourse uses a lot of words to say nothing new”. James Christopher in this paper wrote that “not a single character feels real and rounded”.

Cruise and his production partner, Paula Wagner, famously secured $500 million of investor equity last summer to procure United Artists, and so Lions for Lambs will be seen as something of a cheerleader for the new company, and the newly emerged Cruise brand – UA’s next movie will be Bryan Singer’s Second World War thriller Valkyrie, with Cruise playing the would-be assassin of Adolf Hitler, Claus von Stauffenberg.

There is a lot of attention on Lions for Lambs right now, agrees Steven Gaydos, the executive editor of Variety. “If the movie doesn’t make its money back, or doesn’t generate awards-season traction, then it won’t be an auspicious beginning for UA,” he says. Yet, he insists, Cruise himself, as a brand, as an actor and as a profit-making machine, is bigger than UA. “Classic Hollywood stars such as John Wayne and Clark Gable spent 30 years as leading men,” he explains. “Tom Cruise is at Year 24, and still only 45 years old. He’s still able to ride the motorcycle and crash through the window. UA is just a diversification.”

“He already facilitates the visions of other film-makers by staging readings, offering advice and helping others to get their movies made,” says Cameron Crowe, a close friend, who directed Cruise in Jerry Maguire and Vanilla Sky. “Now he does it officially with UA. It just seems like a natural step.”

Crowe says that the key to Cruise is not in his mogul-like ambitions but his indomitable work ethic. And to understand this you have to go back to the dank and unforgiving crucible of childhood. “I think Tom approached the movie business as a guy who had no famous relatives, no friends in high places, and he was going to get there by tenacity and desire,” Crowe explains. “He watched his mother support a large family as a single parent with little help. He saw the success story of her survival in his own home and it imprinted on him mightily.”

The only boy among four siblings, he suffered at the hands of an abusive, bullying father, was bounced in and out of 15 high schools across the country (he was also dyslexic) and, after his parents divorced, went to live in relative penury with his mother and sisters. The family was so poor, according to Cruise’s biographer Iain Johnstone, that for one Christmas they gave each other, as presents, self-composed poems and even the promise to execute a future household chore. Cruise’s father later died, alone, from cancer at 49.

Though it’s easy to see this material deprivation as a driving force behind the Cruise star machine, it’s also hard not to spot the emotional disjuncture that’s slyly inherent in his otherwise pristine screen persona. His best movie roles, for instance, have been characters that are often emotionally empty, or at least wounded within.

In Magnolia, his motivational guru Frank T. J. Mackey is a wondrous study in paper-thin arrogance. The role, written for Cruise by the perceptive director Paul Thomas Anderson, seemed to pick apart Cruise’s iconic status and then finally present him, at his most vulnerable and exposed, with a dying father to confront (played by Jason Robards). It was to Cruise’s credit that he took the role in the first place, let alone embraced it with such gusto (his performance in the deathbed scene, all silent screams and slowly emerging rage, is one of the great screen turns of our time).

Similarly, films such as Vanilla Sky, Eyes Wide Shutand A Few Good Men all deal with Cruise types who suspect that they may be hollow men after all. Even his famous and ostensibly fatuous blockbuster roles are constructed around characters with primal family scars – in Top Gunhe is haunted by the memory of a dead father; in Rain Mainhis cavalier attitude to his older brother, Dustin Hoffman, hides an oedipal hatred of his father; while in War of the Worlds he is shown to be initially ill-equipped for the trials of fatherhood itself.

It’s this almost intangible sense of potential agony beneath the ostensible ecstasy that makes Tom Cruise such a draw. He is the embodiment of a certain kind of flawless screen hero, and at exactly the same time, seeks to subvert that. “Tom has never been afraid of the dark stuff,” Crowe says.

After his childhood, anything would have been a cakewalk for Cruise. Driven relentlessly by his hard-knocks work ethic, he took some nighttime Stanislavskian acting classes in New York, nabbed a bit part in Taps, a leading role in Risky Business, and then became a box-office magnet in 1986 with Top Gun. He has since been married three times (to Mimi Rogers, Nicole Kidman and, most recently, to Katie Holmes), been vilified in the press for his belief in Scientology, and been dropped, last year, by his former studio Paramount over alleged concerns about his “erratic behaviour” during his much publicised courtship of Holmes.

Yet somehow he rides, with seeming ease, the rough waves of negative media attention. “The real trick is to stay interesting,” Crowe explains. “And Tom Cruise stays interesting by being honest and passionate. The guy on the screen is a magnified projection of exactly who he is.”

So which Tom Cruise has reemerged onto our screens? “Getting out there with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in Lions for Lambs was a good move,” Gaydos says. “ Valkyrie looks interesting too. I think people are focused on the Tom Cruise they remember – the guy who worked his butt off for every movie he made, who promoted the pictures tirelessly, who put himself at risk and tried new things and new genres, and really had a lot of determination and smarts. Well, that guy is back.”

Lions for Lambs is on general release from Friday November 9, 2007

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010