It’s the day after Election Day 2008 and Dennis Hopper sits in a publicist’s conference room a dozen stories above Manhattan’s 42^nd Street, recalling meeting President-elect Barack Obama in Chicago on the day he announced his candidacy in 2007.

Hopper’s wife, Victoria, had been a long-time supporter of Obama, having met him shortly after he’d been elected to the U.S. Senate. So she dragged Hopper along to watch Obama make his announcement to an audience of 8,000 people.

“So I wound up on an elevator with him,” Hopper recalls. “And he turned to me and said, ‘Dennis, I’m so remiss. Your mother died recently and I never offered condolences.’

“We talked about the fact that both our mothers were from Kansas. But what I thought was, This is a very human man, to think of someone else at this moment, right after he’s announced he’s running for president. His election is the best thing that could possibly happen. I marched with Martin Luther King and this was King’s dream. It’s amazing, in my lifetime, to see the changes that have happened.”

That lifetime matches John McCain’s: 72 years and counting: “Which is bizarre for someone who never thought he’d live to be 30,” Hopper notes. And it is as busy as ever, with retrospectives of his artwork, a new TV series (“Crash,” inspired by the Oscar-winning movie) – and a well-regarded performance in one of the year’s sleeper films, “Elegy.”

Which is what Hopper is hear to talk about: He’s part of a campaign to keep “Elegy,” released in August, in the minds of attention-span-challenged awards voters – of the Academy, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and various critics’ groups – as the year-end tsunami of prestige films looms.

Directed by Isabel Coixet, “Elegy” is based on “The Dying Animal” by Philip Roth and stars Sir Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz, along with Hopper, Patricia Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard. Kingsley is a literature professor involved in a consuming affair with Cruz, his much-younger student; Hopper plays Kingsley’s best friend, an aging poet who advises Kingsley on the proper way to deal with a young lover.

“I just love this picture,” Hopper says. “Isabel did such a great job directing. And Penelope gives one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. I remember her from ‘Jamon, Jamon,’ when she was 17. Now she’s like Sophia Loren – she’s taken on this Earth-mother-goddess mantle. All my scenes were with Sir Ben and he’s just wonderful to work with. It’s so rare to have such a nice creative experience with such good material.”

Asked if he’d ever previously had the chance to play a poet – or any kind of artist – Hopper gives a rueful chuckle and says, “I play mostly bad guys. It’s very rare for me to play a normal person. That’s what I’m offered: the bad guy, the crazy. I’ve never had a great romance with Hollywood. So when you do independent films, you do what you can do. I continue to work and to keep my family in shoes.”

His son Henry (now 18, from a previous marriage) put even that notion in perspective for Hopper when Henry was 6 or 7: “He came to me and said, ‘You may be a good actor, Dad, but you played that awful character, Koopa (in 1993’s “Super Mario Bros.”). Why would you do that?’ I told him, ‘To be able to buy you shoes.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘I don’t need shoes that badly.’”

Hopper admits he likes the weird edge he finds in the writing of his character, Ben, a music mogul, in “Crash,” which airs on the Starz network: “That’s fun. The part is so crazy. In the opening sequence of the first episode, I’m talking to my penis: ‘Why did you let me down?’ It’s a lot of work but the scripts are good. Paul (Haggis) and Bobby (Moresco) are pulling out the stops.”

Hopper was a Kansas wunderkind who moved to Hollywood and fell under the spell of James Dean in the 1950s (he appeared in both “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Giant”). From there, he developed a reputation for his own rebelliousness, famously battling directors like Henry Hathaway (while acting opposite John Wayne in “The Sons of Katie Elder”) until he was ostensibly blackballed.

So he went the independent route, directing one of the most successful independent films of all time: “Easy Rider.” But its success only enabled Hopper’s wild streak and after the crash-and-burn of “The Last Movie,” he spent more than a decade battling his reputation and his own addictions before righting himself with an Oscar nomination for 1986’s “Hoosiers.”

If Hopper is known in the U.S. primarily as the former wild man who cleaned up his act (he’s been clean and sober since the mid-1980s), he’s still offered mostly villains and wackos to play on screen. But his fame is far different in Europe.

In the past few years, he’s been honored with major exhibits of his painting, photography and assemblages at museums in Amsterdam and Russia. In October, the Cinematheque Francaise mounted a massive retrospective of his work: as an artist, an actor, a filmmaker and an art collector.

Still, the recognition and retrospectives are a double-edged sword, Hopper admits. It’s nice to get the attention – but it tends to point people in the wrong direction when considering his career.

“Unfortunately, retrospective shows aren’t about going on – they’re about the past,” he says.

Not that there isn’t satisfaction in sharing his history with a young audience. As part of the Cinematheque retrospective, Hopper attended a screening of his 1969 landmark independent film, “Easy Rider,” with a sold-out audience of 800 people a couple of weeks ago.

“The young people loved it,” he says. “I’m not sure anybody got the message 40years ago. They just thought it was a motorcycle movie about being free. But it was a tongue-in-cheek film about what was happening in the country at the time.”

Having burnt his bridges during his drug-and-drink-bingeing days of the early 1970s, Hopper made a brief comeback as a director in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with “Colors” and “The Hot Spot.” But he wound up taking his name off “Backtrack” and hasn’t directed a feature since the goofy “Chasers” in 1994 – though not for lack of interest.

“I’ve been wanting to direct another film for 16 years,” he says. “But I’ve had no luck getting financing. And no one’s dropping great scripts on me.”

His Blackberry buzzes – an incoming call. Hopper answers, then chats with his mother-in-law briefly about how pleased he is with the election results, before hanging up. His wife, he notes, was part of the crowd in Grant Park when Obama delivered his victory speech.

“I’ve been a Republican for a long time,” he says, “since Reagan. I thought he was a bad actor but that it was time to change Congress. I voted for this Bush – and his father. But I became very disturbed by the whole process these past eight years. So I announced, just before Colin Powell did, that I was voting for Obama.

“Thomas Jefferson once said that it’s your responsibility, every 20 years, to vote in the other party. Twenty years is up. The time is ripe to go back.”

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