John Cusack is still working, but the road from leading man to supporting player looks like it narrowed sharply after Drive Hard in 2014. The action film, directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith, is being singled out as the movie that dealt a serious blow to his standing in major film and TV roles.

That is why Cusack’s name keeps coming back into focus now. He has spent decades in the business, from Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything in 1989 to Stephen Frears’ High Fidelity in 2000, and his earlier work helped make him one of the more recognizable faces of his era. But since Drive Hard, he has appeared in only a handful of movies with a fresh Tomatometer score, including Love and Mercy, Chi-Raq and Never Grow Old.

Drive Hard put Cusack in the role of Simon Keller, a criminal who needs a getaway driver after robbing a bank and forcing Peter Roberts to help him. Peter, played by Thomas Jane, is a former race car driver turned driving school instructor, a setup that should have given the film an easy commercial hook. Instead, the movie landed with an 8% score on Rotten Tomatoes, a number that now reads less like a bad review than a marker of a career turn.

The film’s damage is easier to see in what followed than in what it was trying to be. Cusack has not quit acting, but his prominent parts have increasingly been reduced to secondary characters in prominent movies and TV shows, a shift that gives his career a different shape from the one it had in the 1980s and 2000s. He also appears only in the unrated cut of Hot Tub Time Machine 2, even though the rest of the lead ensemble returned.

So the unanswered part is not whether Cusack is still in the business. He is. The real question is whether he can still break back into roles that carry the kind of weight he once had, or whether Drive Hard left him permanently fenced off from that part of Hollywood.