Film Studies: By tomorrow, Leo's going to be yesterday's man

As Christmas 2002 came into view, heads were put together at Miramax and DreamWorks. Both distributors were about to release a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, and they reasoned that it might be smart not to open the pictures on the same day. Spread the jam around. For DiCaprio, remember, is no less than the star, the "king of the world" figurehead, from the most successful movie of all time. If you have forgotten already, that was called Titanic; and it earned over $600m at the box office. In 1997.

"Leonardo" then was 23, and one only had to utter his first name to summon the species, teenage female. Their loyalty to the rather puffy-faced kid was the only explanation for the glory of that old-fashioned film. For a halcyon moment, he could have done anything. He was besieged with offers, attention and foolishness. Yet not much happened beyond his ageing and the narrowing of his rather suspicious eyes. Romeo + Juliet took off in Titanic's wake. But The Man in the Iron Mask didn't, The Beach didn't, and Celebrity didn't.

So the jockeying for position last Christmas was anxious. The results are in now, and they're suggestive. In Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York, DiCaprio plays the film's apparent hero, the young man who determines to avenge the death of his father and who goes up against the king of the Manhattan underworld in the early 1860s. Miramax opted to open first with that film and in four weeks they've done $55m of box-office business.

This is still less than half what Gangs cost, and the figure is slipping fast, despite a schizoid advertising strategy at Miramax: on the one hand they are selling romance (with a horizontal kiss between DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz); on the other, they're going for monumental figures bestriding the cityscape – DiCaprio, Diaz and Daniel Day-Lewis. It's clear that nothing is overcoming the script limitations of the project and DiCaprio's being no match for Day-Lewis.

On the other hand, Catch Me If You Can has done quite nicely for DreamWorks and director Steven Spielberg: after only three weeks, it's taken $120m. Moreover, DiCaprio is close to his old charm as man-child Frank Abagnale, who has a chronic need to impersonate authority figures – surgeons, airline pilots and bank officials. Catch Me If You Can has a serious undertone: it's about a foundling who longs to be captured and fathered by a true authority figure (it turns out to be Tom Hanks); and it's a quick, merry romantic comedy, which suggests that Leonardo's boyishness is not all gone yet.

The Frank Abagnale story has been filmed before: it was the basis for The Great Impostor, a 1961 picture that starred Tony Curtis – full of charm, flash, mischief and a mysterious problem about growing up. What do I mean by that? Well, simply that Tony Curtis, if you think about it, went from an endearing kid to obscurity to a white-haired veteran playing off our nostalgia for his cheek when young. There wasn't anything in between that resembled maturity – or the kind of burden of growing older and sadder that helped Gary Cooper, James Stewart, Cary Grant (and so on) so much.

Whereas, more than ever nowadays, there is a kind of hysterical youthfulness in American male actors that does not know how to yield to real age. It is quite possible that cosmetics and the health craze have conspired in this. But the condition, it seems to me, is evident in DiCaprio (28, but seeming younger), in Tom Cruise (actually 40) and John Travolta (nearly 50).

It comes to this: the very daring young actor who was one Leonardo – in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, This Boy's Life and The Basketball Diaries – would seem to be no more. That's no disgrace; sometimes a teenage energy never burns again. But DiCaprio's trouble is that the huge record of Titanic has put him at the level of at least $20m a picture – so that he has to carry a project. Catch Me If You Can is a merciful kindness: it provides Hanks and Steven Spielberg as cover, and it offers a very suitable part. But he's nearly beyond that.

The teenage audience he once owned has moved on. The new teenagers have fresh idols. It always works this way. Leonardo DiCaprio, I suspect, is over. And yet he has three very big projects that are all supposed to start shooting this year: Alexander the Great, for either Baz Luhrmann or Oliver Stone; The Good Shepherd, to be directed by Robert De Niro; and for Scorsese, again, The Aviator, in which Leonardo is supposed to be Howard Hughes. We'll see. But if more than one of those three makes it all the way to the screen, I'll be surprised.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk