Ryan Gosling's chemistry with his latest leading lady is palpable. "She showed up at the read-through, and I couldn't take my eyes off her," confesses the Canadian actor of his Lars and the Real Girl co-star, a soulful, half-Danish, half-Brazilian newcomer who goes by simply "Bianca." "I found her endlessly fascinating. She's got beautiful little freckles. I would look forward to our scenes together. I was relaxed when she was on set."

Gosling, 26, has impressed Hollywood with his brooding performances as a crack-addicted middle-school teacher in last year's Half Nelson, which earned him an Oscar nomination, and a neo-Nazi Jew in The Believer, his breakout 2001 role. Wider audiences discovered him wooing Rachel McAdams in the 2004 romantic weepie The Notebook and pursuing a murderous Anthony Hopkins in this year's thriller Fracture. But it took Bianca's quiet charm to draw out Gosling's most appealing performance and the one closest, he says, to who he really is. Bianca, by the way, is a life-size, anatomically correct sex doll.

"I don't become characters," says Gosling. "They're all me." His latest screen self is a Midwestern recluse named Lars who orders a sex doll on the Internet and suffers from a delusion that the doll is his real girlfriend. On the advice of a therapist (Patricia Clarkson), Lars' friends and family play along and treat Bianca like any other pretty new girl in town. To become Lars, "I had to get rid of all the posturing and ideas of what I think makes me cool or charming and turn up the more vulnerable parts of myself," Gosling says. In another actor's hands, a relationship with a silicone co-star might devolve into a farce or a gross-out comedy. But Gosling infuses Lars with a gentleness and a sense of wonder, and instead the film unfolds as a subversive romance. "Ryan managed to have a relationship with her that didn't seem ridiculous, embarrassing or weird," says Emily Mortimer, who plays Lars' aggressively loving sister-in-law Karin. "The other thing that dumbfounds me and irritates me a tiny bit is that he managed to be sexy. How can you be playing this weird, overweight guy in galoshes who's socially inept and somehow be a movie star as you're doing it?" It takes an actor who excels at contradiction--a Jewish anti-Semite, a do-gooder drug addict--to pull off the hunky-freak trick. It also helps if he is, in real life, a bit of an oddball.

Gosling grew up in Ontario, Canada, the son of a paper-mill worker and a secretary. "I resented being a kid," he says. "I didn't like being told what to do. I wanted to be a man. I wanted to have an apartment and go on dates and pay for dinner and buy groceries." Gosling's teachers didn't find the antiauthority thing terribly cute, so when he was 10 his mom, whom he describes as Karin-like in her tenacity, began homeschooling him. At 12, Gosling auditioned for The All New Mickey Mouse Club, the 1990s revival of the kiddie variety show, the one that launched the more mainstream careers of Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. "I was confident," Gosling says. "I would do these supersexual moves. They confused my inappropriateness for talent, and once they realized there was no more I could do, it was too late." By then Gosling, his mother and his older sister had packed up and moved to a trailer park in Orlando, Fla.

While his fellow Mouseketeers excelled at singing and dancing, young Ryan acted in a few sketches but mostly whiled away his days scalping his free Disney World passes to families in the parking lot or riding Space Mountain and eating the giant smoked turkey legs sold at the park. At one point, when his parents were divorcing, Gosling moved in with Timberlake's family. He also got a reputation for corrupting his fellow Mouseketeers with detailed descriptions of sexual positions. "All the kids would talk about what kids talk about," he says. "I guess I was talking about it the most. Disney had this meeting with me, and they were like 'You're not Disney material. We're gonna kick you off the show if you say anything sexual again.' I'm f_____g 12. All I care about is sex. How can I not talk about it? I don't know what they expected." It was also at about this time that Gosling told his mother he didn't share his family's Mormon faith. "It didn't really jibe with me," he says. "My mother was really respectful of that."

After Disney, came more than 200 rent-paying episodes of TV--roles as the bully or the friend in kid shows and teen soaps--and a small part in his first film, Remember the Titans, in 2000. But it wasn't until later that year, on the set of The Believer, Gosling says, that "I realized I would act for free." Since then, by Hollywood standards, he virtually has, opting mostly for low-budget indies over the kind of effects spectaculars that buy a guy his first yacht. "Everyone's like 'Wow, you really slummed it on Half Nelson,'" he says. "For two months of work I made way more than my dad would make in a year working at a paper mill. You get all this credit for slumming it in the indie world. It's bullshit. Actors make good money." He seems pretty careful with it too, opting to live in L.A.'s not yet gentrified Skid Row rather than actor-bait neighborhoods like the Hollywood Hills. "I grew up having this thing about money where anybody who had it I didn't like, 'cause I didn't have it," he says. "And then you meet rich people who are really nice. And you realize money gives you the opportunity to do your own things."

His own things have been opening (with friends) Tagine, a Moroccan restaurant in Beverly Hills, where he sometimes helps out in the kitchen, and raising cash to direct a passion project about child soldiers in Uganda. "I've been all over town for that," he says. "Nobody wants to be the one that says no to the child-soldier movie. Everyone tells me, 'If you put a Hollywood actor in it,' but it's not that kind of a movie." Last year during Oscar-campaign season, Gosling was in Uganda researching the film instead of shaking hands at cocktail parties in Los Angeles. Even frail old Peter O'Toole put on a tie and schmoozed. But Gosling still became the youngest Best Actor nominee since 25-year-old John Travolta got a nod for Saturday Night Fever in 1978.

Gosling thrives by flouting most Hollywood conventions. In a town that sorts its talent into neat categories--angry young man, cocky hero, quirky romantic lead--he has hopped around among all three. "It's unusual that an actor would have not only the aspiration but also the talent to move between these different gears," says William Horberg, president of production for Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, which financed the less than $15 million Lars. "He doesn't feel the need to do what's expected of him, or architect a career from the standpoint of maximizing his bankability."