Henry’s mother is Exene Cervenka, the punk-rock icon and lead singer of X, one of the most influential bands to come out of Los Angeles in the 1980s. She met Viggo on the set of a B movie called Salvation and married him in 1987. Henry Blake Mortensen was born a year later. The couple have since divorced but have stayed friendly and raise their son together.

Viggo likes to brag on Henry’s discerning cinematic taste. When the boy was a toddler and insisted on going to a theater to see Dances with Wolves, he sat rapt on his father’s lap, hardly moving for three hours. Walking out of the theater in Santa Monica, Viggo asked what he thought. “I don’t think the Pawnee are all bad,” Henry said thoughtfully. Then he threw his head back and howled like a wolf.

When Henry was ten, his father took him to see Titanic on opening day. They sat, like they always do, smack in the middle of the very first row. When it was over, Henry turned to Viggo and said, “You know, that movie should have been about the boat, not those stupid people.”

About a year later, father and son took a road trip together from New York to Los Angeles. Viggo let Henry choose the route, and when the boy was done charting out all the friends he wanted to see, the map was covered in zigzag lines.

“Instead of being three thousand miles, it was about fourteen thousand miles,” Viggo says of the resulting journey, recalling how Henry asked to go to Memphis, Chicago, Boston, and Seattle-in that order. “I looked at it and thought, Fuck it, we’ll do it. Because when will we ever have another chance?”

*

Every week at Beyond Baroque, a literary-arts center not far from Viggo’s Venice home, there is an open poetry reading. Viggo has read there. So has his ex-wife, Exene. On this winter afternoon, however, it is their son who is reading for the first time. Henry’s mom is here, sitting in the back row. But his father is absent.

At 5:07 P.M., Henry steps up to the microphone. He’s six foot two, three inches taller than his dad, and his build is sturdier. He has fair hair, but he’s dyed it black for a school play. He doesn’t look much like his father, but when he reads — his first poem questions the necessity of national borders; his second is called “The Revolutionary New Product: Yankee Go Home!” — his soft voice and dry sense of humor echo Viggo’s own. As Henry starts to read his third poem, this one about unrequited love, Viggo is speeding toward him from the airport, having just returned from a gig to promote A History of Violence.

Twenty minutes after Henry finishes reading, the actor pulls up to the curb and steps out of his car. Immediately, he is surrounded by autograph seekers, one of whom informs him, “You missed it.” Then he thrusts a pen in Viggo’s face.

Mortensen is known in Hollywood as the rare movie star who will work uncomplainingly for months to support a film, traveling around the country and the world to do interviews and make public appearances. Though he isn’t paid extra to do it, he has dubbed some of his films into Spanish and French — a service, he says, to his fans.

“I have a work ethic,” he says. “If I say I’m going to do something, I do it.” But when that cuts into his life with Henry, it wears him down.

That night in Venice, the actor found his son and took him to dinner to celebrate. There, Henry gave him a private recital. But days later, Viggo is still torn up about it.

“It just killed me that I didn’t make it,” he tells me on the phone one night. He’s calling from a hotel in New York City, where he’s flown for another History of Violence event. It’s after midnight there, but he sounds wired.

It is hard to instill in a child the courage to just be himself, he says. And it’s harder still if his father is famous in a way that sends that child the message, no matter how his parents try to protect him from it, that being himself is not enough. When Viggo thinks of the autograph hounds who crashed Henry’s poetry reading, he turns fierce.

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