It's 11 p.m. on Sunset Boulevard, and Tobey Maguire is sitting at a table outside a Virgin Megastore, where he has just picked up a few CDs: Beck, the Beastie Boys, Led Zeppelin, the Cure. He's wearing a blue windbreaker over a white T-shirt and sporting a crew cut and a month's worth of scraggly beard. In one hand he holds a half-smoked cigar; in the other, a cell phone. Word is there's a party at Chateau Marmont, just down the block, but Maguire's not in the mood. Last night, he, Leonardo DiCaprio and 12 other friends stayed over at the home of a star so fame-addled they had to sign documents vowing they wouldn't discuss the visit with anyone. Tonight, though, Maguire has a more earthbound evening in mind. "I'm kind of psyched to play some dominoes," he says, punching in the number of his regular dominoes adversary, 24-year-old actor Jay Ferguson (Evening Shade)

A night of dominoes may not be quite what we expect from a budding film star. Then again, the 23-year-old Maguire has never been quite what we'd expect a young star to be.

A veteran child actor, Maguire didn't swagger onto the current scene on a red carpet of hype, emanating that all-important teen-magazine musk. Instead, after winning industry buzz for a role opposite Uma Thurman in the 1995 Oscar-nominated short The Duke of Groove, Maguire strode through fame's back door last year with a pair of mesmerizing, wholly unhunky art-house performances -- as a horny shoe salesman in Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry and as an alienated suburban teen-ager in the wrenching drama The Ice Storm. "A couple of times a generation, somebody comes along who's absolutely real and unforced -- you had it with Dustin Hoffman," says writer and director Gary Ross, who snatched up Maguire for the starring role -- a TV-obsessed teen magically sucked into a Father Knows Best-style 1950s sitcom -- in this month's satirical comedy Pleasantville. "Tobey is not chiseled, movie-star handsome. He looks like a real person, like Tom Hanks does. And that makes him tremendously accessible."

Maguire is also, like Hanks, terribly savvy when it comes to managing his own career. Instead of cashing in by battling high-school serial killers in some teen horror flick, he has signed on to play a Civil War soldier opposite Skeet Ulrich in Ang Lee's Ride With the Devil and an orphan haunted by his past in Lasse Hallstrom's screen adaptation of The Cider House Rules both due in theaters next year. "Tobey is so calculated," says his Pleasantville co-star Reese Witherspoon admiringly. "He reminds me of a young Nicolas Cage. He knows exactly which kinds of movies he wants to make, and he's ruthless about what he won't do."

And certain about what he doesn't want -- like the Titanic-size fame that has engulfed his good friend DiCaprio. "From what I've seen, that kind of life is interesting but really difficult," says Maguire, who lives with a roommate in an L.A. house he describes as "comfortable." "Yes, you get some amazing opportunities," he adds. "You can fly on a private jet, and people give you dumb s---. But you get it so often, it's not like a once-in-a-lifetime thing." He pauses, stroking his beard. "I think fame is a real test of what kind of person you are and if you can stay intact."

Trying to stay intact has been an ongoing theme in Maguire's life. His father, Vincent, a construction worker and cook, and his mother, Wendy, a sometime secretary, married young and divorced less than a year later, before Maguire was 2 years old. From that point, Maguire became a reluctant nomad and, he says, "a survivalist," bouncing from Los Angeles to Palm Springs to the San Fernando Valley to Washington state. "We moved like crazy," he says. "I lived with my mom, my mom and her sister, my grandma, my aunt on my mom's side, my dad, my dad and his mom, my dad and his brother, my mom and her boyfriend, my dad and his wife..." He trails off to catch his breath. "Man, I lived in so many situations."

Growing increasingly disaffected, Maguire began ditching school regularly at the age of 12 to watch TV and play video games. "It was tough between my mom and I," he says. "I was just defiant. I would look her in the eye, calm as hell, and say, 'I'm not going to school.' She'd say,'You're forcing me to call the truant officer.' I'd pick up the phone and say,'Do you have the number? I'll dial it for you.'"

Compounding their difficulties, Maguire's mother was struggling to make ends meet. "We'd go to the store, and when she went to pay with food stamps, I'd sometimes walk outside because I was embarrassed," Maguire recalls. "Now that I think about it, that's kind of a chumpy move. I should have stood by my mom."

Maguire's main ambition as a kid was to be a cook, like his father. But when his mother, who had abandoned her own dreams of becoming an actress, offered him $100 to take a drama class in sixth grade, it was a no-brainer. "F---, a hundred bucks to a 12-year-old is, like, a stack of money," he says. "It's funny, a hundred bucks is nothing now."

The drama bug quickly took hold, even as Maguire's interest in his other classwork waned. He was doing commercials for Atari and McDonald's by the age of 13, and eventually landed guest parts on shows like Roseanne and Jake and the Fatman. At 18, having earned his GED, he moved into an apartment in Silverlake, Calif., and began working the Young Hollywood audition circuit.

During those early years, Maguire would continually find himself going up aganist the same actors, including DiCaprio. "We both auditioned for a TV show called Parenthood," he recalls. "Leo was doing karate kicks in the hallway. I was like, there's no way that kid's getting the job. He was just too relaxed -- which is probably why he got it. I ended up doing a couple of lines on that show, which is when we started hanging out."

Among the roles the two competed for was the lead in 1993's This Boy's Life. DiCaprio won the part, of course, and his career took off. Maguire, who ended up with a small role as "a friend," went on to star in a short-lived Fox series called Great Scott! Still, Maguire had no hard feelings: "I've always had the attitude that you get things when you're ready for them, and I wasn't ready then."

Maguire is reluctant to discuss his friendship with DiCaprio in depth. "Right now, it's, like, a moment for Leo, and everybody is asking about him," he says guardedly. "We go out to dinner or go dancing, like any normal 22-,23-year-old guys. Yeah, there are some extreme circumstances. I've been on a private jet with with eight or nine of my buddies. But it's all harmless stuff. People can say whatever the f--- they want. We just live our lives." (On the subject of Don's Plum -- the largely ad-libbed, off-color 1996 low-budget film starring Maguire and DiCaprio that they have blocked from release, according to a $10 million lawsuit by the film's producer -- Maguire declines to comment.)

"I think it's great that Tobey has found this group of friends that are constantly loyal," says Witherspoon. "It can be isolating for a kid in this business, knowing that people can betray you. I think, because of that, their bond has become ever tighter."

It's almost midnight, and Maguire sill hasn't reached Ferguson, so he decides on a quiet evening with his girlfriend, a woman he has been dating for seven months but chooses not to name. Sorry to disappoint, but there will be no wild Young Hollywood antics to report on this night. Maguire doesn't even drink. "It's not like I've never tried a drink or a drug," he says. "I just think it can get in the way of what I want to do.

"A lot of people can't handle being successful," he continues. "They don't think they're worth it, so they make themselves not worth it and they f--- up." He pauses, his cigar smoke trailing into the L.A. night. "I have self-esteem issues. I think everybody does. But the bottom line is these opportunities have been give to me. They were my f---ing dreams and I'm not going to f--- it up."