PLAYING IT CLOSE TO VEST; `ROUNDERS' STAR EDWARD NORTON LOW-KEY EXCEPT ON THE SCREEN.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

It's that time in Edward Norton's short but outstanding career to take on the obligatory sleazeball role.

He's done Yale (though his fields of study were history and Japanese, not at the university's storied drama school). He quickly rose through the ranks of famed playwright Edward Albee's New York theater company.

Then Norton made his movie debut as a brilliantly deceptive sociopath in ``Primal Fear,'' and earned an Oscar nomination for it. This was followed by the anointment-like casting in a Woody Allen project (``Everyone Says I Love You'') and a showy courtroom bit as the most decent guy, despite being a lawyer, in ``The People vs. Larry Flynt.''

So now comes ``Rounders,'' a gritty film about professional poker players in which Norton gets to play a trouble-seeking jailbird appropriately called Worm. A brilliant card player who nonetheless can't resist cheating, Worm is the wayward anti-conscience of his best friend and equally genius poker partner, Matt Damon's conflicted law student Mike McDermott.

Scrawny Worm favors grungy, brown leather jackets and is perpetually in need of a shave and, probably, a shower. He's constantly in hock to underworld types, and almost seems to enjoy the occasional beatings he so eminently asks for. The character recalls ``Midnight Cowboy's'' Ratso Rizzo and ``Mean Streets' '' Johnny Boy, similarly scummy roles Norton's idols Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro played at equivalent points in their early careers.

Except that this guy's a little different, at least according to Norton.

``I think Worm fits in a fine tradition of lovable rogues; I don't think he views himself as a loser,'' the unassuming but articulate 29-year-old actor says. ``This'll sound funny, but it's actually very serious: I had this operating image of Bugs Bunny in my mind with Worm, but dressed as Keith Richards.

``You always need to find a line in on a character, and Bugs Bunny is always scheming, always two steps ahead of a beating and always laughing. Worm is completely comfortable with who he is in a deep, conscious, philosophic sense. He accepts and declares that the game for him is not poker but the hustle, and he loves it. He loves the running and the hiding; he's living the way he wants to live.''

This is part of what makes Norton such an amusing and magnetic actor: an ability to defend a Looney Tunes concept with intellectualized, persuasive logic. And he obviously has the talent to put that into his performances as well as he puts it into words.

``Ed Norton is very professional and disciplined,'' says Oscar-winning actor Martin Landau, who appears in ``Rounders'' and has taught acting to the likes of Jack Nicholson and James Dean. ``You can see in his work attention to detail and a certain kind of focus that's special.''

``A lot of the scenes with Edward . . . I just love watching him in the movie and I loved watching him while we were making it,'' co-star Damon, as hot as can be after writing and starring in ``Good Will Hunting'' and playing the title role in ``Saving Private Ryan,'' reveals. ``He brought a lot of levity to it.''

Norton is perhaps having a harder time keeping the laugh level up these days. Though a cordial conversationalist, he clearly takes great umbrage to personal questions - and he's gotten a good deal of them since being romantically linked to his attention-attracting ``Larry Flynt'' co-star Courtney Love.

`It's a distraction'

``Sometimes it's a distraction,'' Norton says. ``Sometimes I just find myself unimpressed with people's narrow-mindedness or their presumption, frankly. The bottom line is: You don't know who my girlfriend is; you don't have any idea and you're probably wrong. But people will presume all kinds of things.

``But that's the way it is, and at the end of the day you've just got to let it fly right on by you. It's not relevant, it doesn't actually come in and impact your life, minute-to-minute, all that often. You just have to try to draw boundaries as positively as you can.''

Some information has gotten past the boundaries. Norton was raised in Columbia, Md., by a lawyer father and an English teacher mother (both parents have worked for the public good, too, dad for the Carter administration and National Trust for Historic Preservation and his late mom for the grant-distributing Abell Foundation).

Norton's grandfather, James Rouse, founded the company that created the planned community of Columbia and such urban destinations as New York's South Street Seaport. He also started the Enterprise Foundation, an outfit dedicated to creating low-income housing, of which Norton is a board member.

And Norton lived a year in Japan. Anything else about him, he likes to keep a mystery.

But he's more than eager to tell you why.

``That comes from an instinct that all that stuff absolutely gets in the way of everything I'm trying to achieve on a creative level,'' Norton says. ``Which is, very distinct characters that you can get lost in without the inflection and interference of what you know about me. That's a very conscious choice.''

Fair enough. But sometimes, things happen that demand addressing, even if they might distract from or influence a film-watching experience.

That's the case with Norton's next release, ``American History X.'' A searing examination of contemporary racism, in which Norton plays a reformed Nazi skinhead trying to prevent his younger brother (``Terminator 2's'' Edward Furlong) from following his path of hatred. The film has been quite publicly disowned by its first-time director, English conceptual artist Tony Kaye.

For months, Kaye has been taking out alternately inscrutable and imploring ads in the Hollywood trade papers asking Norton and the film's other creative contributors to side with him against New Line Cinema, ``X's'' bankroller. New Line plans Oct. 30 to release a cut of the film Kaye submitted; Kaye has demanded more time and money to do re-shoots and re-edits.

Last week, the Directors Guild of America made the highly unusual decision to deny Kaye's request to replace his name with Alan Smithee, the official pseudonym used when a director doesn't want to acknowledge authorship of a film. Kaye responded with an effort to have the movie credited to Humpty Dumpty.

``You have to recognize that Tony is as sincerely committed to hype art and concept art as he is as a filmmaker,'' Norton observes, with a chuckle, about the man whose ``art installations'' include hiring homeless people to appear at London's Tate Gallery and L.A.'s Getty Museum. ``It's almost hilarious - and somewhat strange - that he's chosen to target his own movie with his hype art.''

Norton denies reports that he was heavily involved in some editing sessions of the film, and that that was partially responsible for Kaye's distress.

``I have to be honest. My involvement in it is really rather limited,'' Norton says. ``This thing that has gone on is between him and the studio. I do think that it's funny that he's presented it as a big chasm between his film and their film, because the film they have is his film, the last cut that he delivered, sort of, before the deadline.

``The irony is that the film that he gave them is amazing. I am so proud of this movie, and thrilled about everything Tony did. He shot it too, and it's visually one of the most unique films I've seen in a long time. It's a very, very wrenching movie, and I hope people will let it speak for itself without trying to second-guess everything that went on with it.''

Things in the movie business, Norton is learning, can spin out of one's control. Nevertheless, he's trying to have more influence on his films. Following his next picture, ``The Fight Club,'' co-starring Brad Pitt and directed by ``Seven's'' David Fincher, he'll produce as well as star in ``Keeping the Faith,'' a romantic comedy about a priest who falls in love.

Not that he intends to turn into a control freak or anything. As planned out as Norton's career may appear, he says there's no method to the choices he makes. Indeed, he sounds vaguely Worm-like when he acknowledges that even the most talented players in this game are, in a crucial way, always gambling.

``Not everything you do is going to be for everybody, first of all, and that's totally fine,'' he says. ``And second of all, the best thing about making movies is that they're collaborative and the worst thing about making movies is that they're collaborative. You cannot control it all, you cannot ever predict that all the elements that go into making a film are going to gel.

``You can only know why you're going after it and what you hope it could be and take your best shot. And you're not gonna hit it every time; you're just not, and you've got to be grounded about that.''

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2 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) PLACING HIS BETS

`Rounders' star Edward Norton hits pay dirt with gritty roles

(2) ``I think Worm fits in a fine tradition of lovable rogues; I don't think he views himself as a loser,'' the unassuming 29-year-old actor Edward Norton says of his character in ``Rounders.''