Some people watch movies; Sean Patrick Flanery lives them. He's speeding down a Nevada highway in a '65 Cadillac he bought seven years ago from a hermaphrodite who once appeared on the Sally Jessy Raphael show.

On his way back to L.A. after a rollicking New York's bash in Vegas, Flanery absent-mindedly blabs on a faulty cellular phone that cut him off every 10 minutes. Cactuses zip by. You don't even have to be there to know how much it looks like a road movie. Kim, his quiet female friend, is, he tells me, riding shotgun. But don't get any ideas. "She's my best friend on the planet," Flanery offers. "We don't touch ding-a-ling or anything. But she has seen me naked." The chameleon who played both the ultrasensitive outsider Powder in the movie of the same name and TV's swashbuckling Young Indiana Jones came to acting the usual way, through his love of the craft. Or something. "I was going to the University of St. Thomas, in Houston," he recalls, "and I saw a really beautiful girl walking out of the drama department. She was the perfect embodiment of everything I found wonderful about the opposite sex. Long dark hair parted in middle, big brown eyes - she was foxy galora !" The class she was taking turned out to be taught by man Flanery describes as "the ding-dang deal." The professor's enthusiasm managed to pry attention away from the object of his desire long enough to teach him a few tricks.

But it seems the best trick the 32-years-old Flanery learned was one they can't teach in acting school: how to get the roles you audition for. In 1991, after only a year in L.A., he was chosen from the Young Indy role. Now, after the job he describes as "five years of film school" working with young directors in 33 different countries, he's got at least six art-house flicks scheduled for release in 1998, including Eden, with Joanna Going, Zack and Reba, Best Men, Pale Saints and Just Your Luck. This month, he appears in the Dead Poets Society-meets-GoodFellas mob movies Suicide Kings, with Christopher Walken, in which Flanery plays one of five boy ingenues who kidnap a mobster. Is the Houston native threatening to start a second wave of sexy-Texan mania, leaving the independent-film would scratching its head and asking, "Matthew McConaugh-who?"

No, it's Jonny Depp territory Flanery is invading, taking on beautiful freaks one after another. "Mostly I tend to plug into character work, as opposed to straightforward leading man," he concedes. In Eden, he plays a student who acts as a psychic go-between when MS-stricken wife of his boarding-school professor starts to have out-of-body experiences. For Best Men, he dons the cloak of a bank robber who "goes around barfing out bits and pieces of Hamlet." Flanery describes Zack, he character in Zack and Reba, as "a misfit, kind of a freakly boy; he's a really bizarre guy that never really fit in." All these outcasts, after he inhabited Powder's shaved and floured Jeremy Reed, an albino waif who conducts electricity like a broken toaster. With his quirky taste in roles, it sounds like it's already too late when Flanery cries, "I don't want to be typecast as the oddball."

Flanery's background comes up short as an explanation for his love playing odd balls - unless he's rebelling against his normalcy. (His having one older sister and one half sister gave his immediate family exactly 2.5 children.) The son of a retired real-estate-broker mom and a retired a medical equipment salesman, Flanery wasn't even fazed by their divorce when he was 16. "I understood where they were coming from," he says. "I understood a great deal more than people gave me credit for. I came out of it unscathed, unless you take into consideration my s--- relationships and how every f---ing one stinks ! " he jokes. A surfing fanatic, Flanary didn't even find living in Houston such a big disadvantage. "I would skip many a day in school and go to the beach," he says. Kim, the girl in the passenger seat, grew up next door to him. He loves his mom. "There are 17 important people on the planet, and she is nine of them," he says proudly. During The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, he confesses, "I came back home for one week every year for about six years."

The intensity of his workload tends to preclude a personal life right now, but Flanery admits he's a courtin'. "There's girl I like. I think I'm gonna pass her a note in study hall, see if she likes me," he coyly remarks. But there still ain't nothin' like the fake thing for Flanery. "I tend not to want people I'm close to around when I'm filming. When I'm trying so hard to convince myself I'm somebody else, the last thing I need is someone reminding me of who I really am."