What becomes a star the most? For Tom Cruise, it’s control.

“In order to do my job,” Ben Stiller, as Tom Cruise’s stuntman Tom Crooze, reflects in a video made for the 2000 MTV Movie Awards, “I have to ask myself: Who is Tom Cruise? What Tom Cruise? Why Tom…Cruise?

It’s a tricky question.

On screen, Cruise is arguably our biggest movie star, as New York Times reporter Nicole Sperling recently explained — the last true representative of a century-old studio system that has been steadily eroded by rising forces in cinema and franchise streaming. His powerful charisma and daredevil stunts combined, once again, in his latest hit, “Top Gun: Maverick,” which surpassed the billion-dollar mark.

Off screen, Cruise is elusive. He is the frequent public spokesperson for a cryptic and controversial religion that seems harder to understand the more he talks about it. He is extremely secretive about the details of his private life. Even when he makes the occasional effort to look like a regular, relatable guy, he ends up looking like an AI approximation of one. Asked by Moviebill magazine to describe his most memorable movie experience, Cruise couldn’t name one. (“I love movies,” he said, very normally.) When asked which team he backs at a Giants-Dodgers game he attended last fallhe has answered, “I’m a baseball fan.”

It can be difficult to reconcile these disparate sides. It is therefore worth asking the question: Who is Tom Cruise?

Much of his early success as an actor in the 80s and 90s was based on a certain down-to-earth charm. The sexual and disruptive young cruiser of “Risky Business”; the candid and naively endearing cruising of “Cocktail”; and the tenacious, morally principled cruising of “Jerry Maguire” each relied on its ability to convincingly embody the American Everyman, the likable heartthrob audiences could desire or encourage. At the turn of the century, he complicated this image by appearing in more difficult and less accessible films, such as “Eyes Wide Shut” and “Magnolia”. Writers like Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson helped portray Cruise as a serious actor, capable of delivering subtle and nuanced performances.

He moved away from romance, drama and independent arthouse. Over the past decade-plus, it’s become more firmly entrenched in the action-adventure genre, perfecting the summer blockbuster. His performances tend to emphasize his easy charisma and powerful athleticism, but Cruise still brings to these roles a touch of the same delicate charm and acting undertone of his dramatic fare. You see it in the airy, naturalistic chemistry he shares with Jennifer Connelly in “Maverick,” and the jaded, world-weary intensity he carried through the final two sequels of “Mission: Impossible.” My favorite recent Cruise performance was from the underrated “Edge of Tomorrow” (2014), in which he plays a cowardly, whiny politician forced to relive the same deadly battle over and over – a playful spin on sci-fi on “Groundhog Day” which found the actor playing against type to delightful effect.

But that’s only part of the story. One of the defining features of the last decade of his career is a level of quality control for which he himself is primarily responsible. It’s not that he’s incapable of making a bad movie: “The Mummy” (2017), Universal’s failed attempt to launch an entire “dark universe” of big-budget creature features, clearly has it. show. But Cruise’s recent movies have in common a degree of ambition and enthusiasm that’s rare in today’s blockbuster landscape, and when it all works out, that effort pays off hugely. You won’t see Cruise phone in a performance. You get the feeling he treats every movie he makes these days as if it’s the most important he’s ever made.

The results of this commitment have a way of feeling almost miraculous. How could anyone have expected “Top Gun: Maverick,” a sequel to a 35-year-old action movie with a pretty cool critical reputation, to not only be far superior to the original film, but also the one of the best action movies of many years? But then you read Cruise’s stubborn insistence on keeping everything as real as possible – demanding a minimum of computer-generated effects, forcing himself into strenuous flight training, encouraging his co-stars to endure speeds of force G until they literally vomit. Some of Cruise’s co-stars over the years have called his obsession extreme to the point of looking like cinematic despotism, and admittedly it would probably be easier and cheaper to do much of that in front of a green screen. But it’s not Cruise. When it comes to that stuff, he cares too much.

“Mission: Impossible” was a clever spy film, directed by Brian De Palma, based on a 1960s television series. How is it possible that it got five sequels, and how is it conceivable that the sequels continue to improve, culminating in “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” (2018), which is pretty much an unqualified masterpiece? (The final two installments, “Dead Reckoning Part One” and “Dead Reckoning Part Two,” are due in 2023 and 2024.) Again, credit should go mostly to Cruise, who, for our entertainment sake, will happily climb the tallest building in the world, hold your breath for six and a half minutes or jump out of a plane with the cameraman.

But Cruise’s devotion to filmmaking runs deeper, if that’s possible. It’s a devotion to movies with a capital M. As A-list talent flocks to deep-pocketed streamers with blockbuster ambitions, Cruise has remained adamant that he won’t be making a movie for Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. refuse to negotiate on the possibility of a VOD premiere for “Maverick” earlier in the pandemic. (“I make movies for the big screen,” he explained.) His interest in preserving that traditional cinematic experience shines through in the colossal scale of the productions themselves, so that when Cruise threatens you in huge Imax dimensions, it feels just as big as the picture. It’s a reminder that much of what we watch is fit for the age of streaming – a mass of “content” designed to play just as well on a phone as it does on the big screen. For those of us who still care deeply about cinema and fear for its future, Cruise’s efforts seem invaluable.

It’s also a reminder of why we go to the theater to see Tom Cruise movies – to see Tom Cruise himself. One can still be tempted in the movies by the names on the marquee, but as franchises have become the dominant force in the business, the persuasive power of those names has diminished. The supremacy of proven, bankable IP today over the mainstream star system means we’re more likely to seek out Spider-Man, Thor, and Captain America than Tom Holland, Chris Hemsworth, and Chris Evans; the caped actor is more interchangeable than ever. With the Cruise films, this relationship is reversed. Anyone particularly interested in The Adventures of Ethan Hunt? (That’s his character’s name in “Mission: Impossible,” in case you forgot.) Hunt is just another name for the man we really care about: Cruise, pure and simple.

Cruise has all the qualities you expect from a movie star and none of the qualities you expect from a human being. As a screen presence, he is unique; as a person he is impenetrable. But it was his inscrutability that allowed him to achieve a kind of clarified and immaculate superstardom, which exists almost entirely in the movies, uncontaminated by mundane concerns. Cruise the star burns as bright as any of his contemporaries, and far brighter than any who have appeared since, in part because he continues to dedicate himself more and more to his work and to surrender less and less everywhere else. Who is he? You have to watch the movies to find out.