The anti-ingenue

South Lake Tahoe, Calif. —  For Jena Malone “ageism” has always been an issue. Malone isn’t your typical 40-year-old actress, newly sidelined to character roles, or a graying writer sent to pasture for presumed inability to comprehend teen lingo.

She is about as fresh-faced as they come, a dewy 19-year-old, with white luminous skin, sad greenish eyes and floppy brown hair that slopes down to her long, oval cheeks. It looks as if it would be a sleek, chic haircut if Malone bothered to gel or mousse or blow dry, but that doesn’t appear to be her inclination. She’s dressed in a large, light-blue T-shirt and huge jeans that swim around her thin figure. There are enormous rips on each leg.

She’s hunched over a plate of tacos in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Lake Tahoe, where she lives, and her girlish tones compete with the background drone of Spanish-language TV.

“I’m not an ageist to any degree. I just think that in this day and age we live in, there are so many restrictions by age,” she says. “You can’t live on your own until you’re 18 unless you’ve had these years of high school. It wasn’t always like that. The Virgin Mary was 13, you know.” Despite looking vaguely beatific herself, she’s absolutely emphatic. “People are ready when they’re ready. I meet 40-year-olds that have absolutely no clue how to take care of themselves.”

Malone is a specialist in girls adrift in a world without reliable adults, girls who’ve had to take care of themselves. At 11, her character was raped and molested by her abusive stepfather (“Bastard Out of Carolina”); she’s also eaten out of garbage dumps (“Hidden in America”), slept with her brother (“The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys”), tempted both a terminally ill father and his misfit son (“Life as a House”) and shot heroin (“United States of Leland”). She was humble, transparent and utterly unsentimental -- one of the most distinctive performers of her generation. From a young age, she bypassed much studio fare on her own idiosyncratic search for real representations of real people.

Now, as a teenager, she’s become the anti-ingenue, the girl whose emotions aren’t neatly boxed up into mindless morsels that can be easily digested in 90 minutes. In a universe of Britney Spears, she’s Avril Lavigne, with her own hardscrabble childhood to lend real pathos to her performances.

Anjelica Huston recalls first meeting Malone, then 11, when she came in to audition for “Bastard Out of Carolina,” the film version of Dorothy Allison’s memoir about her desperate childhood with her mom and her abusive stepfather. “What I saw was a child with the eyes of a 40-year-old woman. She initially looked small and slight, and she had a kind of vulnerability, certainly, but also a quality of having seen an enormous amount and someone who’s assimilated it. There was something very raw about her.”

“Jena had a quasi-tragic feeling about her,” recalls director John Stockwell, who directed her in the HBO film “Cheaters.” “She seems world-weary. She [has] endured a lot.”

She has -- moving 30 times as a kid, ricocheting around the West with her single mom. She wound up legally divorcing her mother in a process called emancipation when she was 14 and moving out on her own.

Today, Malone seems slightly wilted from a long drive from L.A. but otherwise content. She’s in love. She has a new home, the first house she’s ever owned. She’s determinedly upbeat, but the optimism isn’t pliability or docility. It appears to be a willed decision, a point of view, a sword.

The point of acting for her isn’t just to lose oneself in glamour and glitz, or even simply to entertain. There’s a moral component. “She gravitates to roles that are unique voices of American teens,” says Brian Dannelly, who directed her in the just-released comedy “Saved,” where Malone plays a girl in a Christian high school who, after seeing Jesus in a swimming pool, sleeps with her boyfriend to try to “cure him” of homosexuality and winds up pregnant. She spends most of the film trying to hide her growing belly, from her mom, her new suitor, and the social queens who rule the school. “She’s like the voices of these girls who don’t normally get voices.”

“I hate labeling people ‘the troubled teen,’ ” Malone says. “We were all troubled teens maybe six months of our life. I don’t find there’s a lot of truth in happy-go-lucky teenagers. There’s truth in moments of that, but if you don’t show both sides, you’re not respecting the complex nature of youth. We’re quite complex.”

Malone tries to fight Hollywood’s impulse to turn youth into a commodity, and it will be interesting to see how long she can maintain her quirky independence as she begins to play adult roles. “As a young actress, it’s kind of a gross thing to be because of how marketable youth and teenage sexuality is,” she says. “I’ve tried to stay away from false representations of female sexuality.” To this end, she won’t allow hair styling and makeup at photo sessions or wear clothes that don’t belong to her. “If [you] want to take a picture, you’re going to have to deal with my acne. I don’t want to sell something that’s false to young girls who may look up to some of the roles I’ve done. You have to be careful what you put into the culture.”

Nurtured by nature

After lunch, she climbs into a dusty BMW station wagon. Cigarette butts tumble out of the ashtray, and a baggy of goldfish lays on the seat. Malone generally drives to L.A. when she goes on auditions, in part because she’s too young to rent a car. The new Modest Mouse album plays on the stereo, and she hums along as she talks.

Malone left L.A. over a year ago and returned to the woodsy beauty of Tahoe, where she lived happily between second and fourth grades with her mom and her “godmom,” with a passel of kids in a trailer behind an amusement park and then a tiny apartment. Her moms cleaned hotels. “I was really so poor when I was young, I was counting change for Taco Bell,” she says.

But there was always the outdoors. “This was the first time I had, instead of a block to play on, a whole forest. I would make up songs and stories and build forts and take really good care of them. I’d go after school and sweep them out and hang things and pretend to have tea. Those spaces were really special, something that were my own.”

As she drives she points out Lake Tahoe Community College, where she recently took photo courses, but has no plans on getting a degree. In fact, she earned her G.E.D. instead of finishing high school in part because once she split with her mother, she no longer had anyone to drive her to school every day.

“I’m just a weirdo,” she says. “I’m a firm believer in self-education. I like learning one thing and learning it well. I’m a student for life. I read a lot. I make assignments for myself.”

She reads constantly, particularly when she’s on set, to conserve her energy and keep the stories flowing. It was “Pride and Prejudice” on the set of the Hollywood weepy “Stepmom,” Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” during the surreal “Donnie Darko,” and on “Saved” she kept her nose in Kenzaburo Oe. She pulls up to a modest A-frame house, set on a hill. She wanted a fixer-upper that she wouldn’t mind living in until she got around to fixing it up. There are white cottage cheese walls and exposed beams, and Malone’s own black-and-white photographs, dreamy montages of her 5-year-old half-sister.

She lives here with her boyfriend of a year and a half. He’s a local musician whom she met through her godmom. She girlishly shows his picture on her cellphone and explains: “I met him one Thanksgiving when I was 13. I immediately had a huge crush on him.” Malone has a lot of extended family, people she calls brothers and sisters who are actually children of her godmom. “Family is whom you let in,” she says. “It depends on who you trust.”

When her “moms” went their separate ways, she and her birth mother moved alone to Vegas. She hated it. The cliche of child actors is that they’re just living out their parents’ fantasies, but Malone was the prime instigator of her career, fascinated by theater ever since she starred as a dancing flower at 4. At 9, she was combing through the local ads when she saw one for an acting seminar that promised to teach kids how to get into movies and TV.

“The whole thing was a total fraud,” she recalls, but the organizer did land her an audition for a UCLA student film, which she nailed. Her mother agreed to move south. “She was totally supportive. I kind of forced her into it in the worst way. It’s amazing how astute children are at pushing people’s buttons.”

They stayed in an abandoned nursing home owned by a friend. “Every time you’d turn on the lights the cockroaches would scatter. There were so many bugs.” Malone found a legitimate manager and a nonspeaking part in a Michael Jackson video and then landed the lead in “Bastard Out of Carolina.”

She wasn’t fazed by the theme of sexual abuse; it was an important topic, something that had happened to a close friend of hers. Malone thrived on playing with the fires unleashed in her. “Even when it was intense and I was crying, I felt that it was really something very powerful that I was playing with. You just kind of lose yourself.”

Simply being professional at age 11 was the hard part, “Working for 10 hours a day. If it was a smaller film, it could be 15 hours. I remember going one day for really long hours, but I can’t tell you what [film]. I’m sure it was against the child labor laws.”

Malone is crouching by one of the windows in the living room, blowing cigarette smoke out to the sky. She says she’s trying to quit but gets nervous when she talks a lot. The streets and the nearby houses all seem empty, as it’s off season in vacationland.

Malone won a lot of kudos for her performance, including a Cable Ace nomination. In the two years afterward, she made six television movies, including Goldie Hawn’s directorial debut, “Hope,” and “Ellen Foster,” which made one New York Times critic marvel, “What is perhaps most impressive about this fine performance is that it is distinct, informed by what has come before but full of fresh insight -- about the craft of acting and the chaos of adult life.” Next, she played Jodie Foster’s character as a young girl in “Contact” and starred with Julia Roberts in “Stepmom”.

Soon, she was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars and supporting her mother, Debbie, who’d never earned much and had spent time on welfare. It’s the frequent conundrum of the child actor. A child can’t act without a parent on set, and a parent can’t really work if their child is acting.

“There was a good relationship, but I think Jena was often the adult in the situation and she often called the shots,” Huston recalls.

“It’s so weird any time the roles are reversed between parent and child,” Malone says. “Your parent has to deal with the money issues and you find out they’ve mismanaged something, you blame it on them, but you would have probably made worse decisions.”

She’s alluding to what happened next -- her suit to emancipate herself, in which she charged that her mother had squandered thousands of Jena’s dollars on loans, never repaid, to her relatives. Her mother initially agreed to the emancipation but later fought it and maintained that the loans were in fact investments. When Malone was working on “Cheaters,” HBO hired armed guards to keep her mother from the set.

“She was going through a period, what any 14-year-old goes through, trying to find her own identity and hating her mother, and breaking out on her own,” director Stockwell says. “It was maybe the kind of relationship conflict that would play out in the living room, and the mom would ground the 14-year-old and that would be the end of it, but in this case, she was starring in an HBO film, so her mom couldn’t just send her to her room.”

After a period of not talking, Malone and her mother are reconciled. “I recognized that I was childish in a lot of my opinions of her, and she recognized she wasn’t giving me the respect I should have been given,” Malone says circumspectly. “We have a better relationship now than we ever had, being separated. If you spend that much time with any one parent, you totally get on each other’s nerves.”

Her mother, who now works for the University of Nevada, Reno, declined to discuss her daughter in detail, although she did say, “Jena handles herself very well in her career choices and I’m very pleased with what she’s doing in her life. We see each other often.”

Indie dependent

One evening in Hollywood, Malone is sitting in a half-circle of actors performing a staged reading of “Paperman,” a screenplay that was workshopped at the Sundance Institute. Dressed in a brown “I love Crabs” T-shirt and cargo pants, she doesn’t seem to be reading the part as much as inhabiting it. Her face glows.

She’s playing a young Cape Cod townie in a “Lost in Translation”-type relationship with an older writer. The film hasn’t found financing. Malone, in fact, has a stack of beloved indie scripts looking for money. She knows her taste, and a couple of years ago, she fired her agents after they tried to jam her into “The Parent Trap.”

“They sent it to me eight times, and I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this movie,’ ” she says. “I just felt like they didn’t get me.” Malone isn’t averse to studio films as long as they’re smart. She has a supporting role in a new version of “Pride and Prejudice” that will star Keira Knightley.

At she steps into the adult world, she find herself competing against more conventionally pretty girls, often the very teen queens who made the more conventional films she eschewed. “Unfortunately, sometimes it’s not about talent. It’s about someone having a movie out. The phenomenon behind Hilary Duff.” The former Lizzie Maguire and Malone go up for the same parts.

“Saved!” is reminiscent of a John Hughes film, with its band of outsiders wrestling with the tyrannies of the high school elite, but the school in question is an ultra-conservative Christian academy. Director Dannelly likes to call it “sweetly subversive” and recalls how Malone and its young cast, including singer Mandy Moore and former child star Macaulay Culkin, barnstormed Christian youth rallies and would sing and pray with the crowd.

The producers are at pains to say that the film isn’t anti-Christian. “Anyone of faith who is secure in that faith probably has a sense of humor about it and would like the movie,” says producer Michael Stipe, who also happens to be the lead singer of the band R.E.M.

Despite her immersion in the Christian world, it doesn’t sound as if Malone actually got saved. The day she shot her last scene, she went out and shaved her head, with one fell swoop abandoning the nice-girl persona.

When the reading is over, she lingers at the party. She crams a few creampuffs in her mouth, goes out for a smoke. Her agent, Allison Band, embraces her and gives her pages from the new script for “The Nanny Diaries,” to be directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, the team behind “American Splendor.” Malone will audition for it in the morning.

She leaves a few minutes later. . Outside, it’s now very dark and empty. This isn’t a part of town where young girls -- particularly ones who look as defenseless as Malone -- should be walking around late at night by themselves. Still, she adamantly declines a ride to her car, parked several blocks away on a side street. She’s not afraid of whoever she might meet on these desolate streets. “They’re good people,” she insists, her lips curled in determination. “You just got to look them in the eye.”