My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way--with his ghostly pallor, long unwashed hair, and goth boots--would probably always look out of place sipping iced coffee at a café in a yuppified section of Brooklyn. But he looks downright alien in his trademark ripped and stitched black leather jacket on an 80-degree spring day. "Oh, I'm perfectly comfortable," he says. "I got used to leather early on. Wearing it made me feel like the person I was supposed to be onstage."

That person is a shrieking, charismatic screamo star who leads his band through relentless, cinematic stormers with titles like "You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us in Prison." "People stopped telling stories with their music," says Way, 27. "They just wrote about their girlfriends." In response, he plotted the New Jersey quintet's blistering second album and major-label debut, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, like a movie, with a twisted backstory about a doomed murderer promising the Devil 1,000 evil souls in exchange for a reunion with his lover.

Though friendly and somewhat soft in person (he cops to wearing a sweater with "little snowflakes on it" in winter), Way tries to inhabit his hell-scarred protagonist onstage--going so far as to command an angry crowd to hock loogies at him. "I got 600 kids to spit on me," he says with pride. "The audience hated us, and they still did what I said!"