Dern, Baby, Dern

The legs of Laura Dern: Camping out at the Malibu Beach Inn.

In adolescence, she made her name in films as the sunny girl on the edge of the shadows. In Joyce Chopra's Smooth Talk and David Lynch's sinister Blue Velvet, Laura Dem projected a bright, alabaster-blond purity that contrasted with—and suggested disquieting links to—a menacing twilight world.

"I've always been attracted to things that expose the light and the dark, because they're both there,'' says Dem, daughter of actors Bruce Dem and Diane Ladd. "If you try to repress that, you're walking into trouble."

In Roland Joffe's upcoming Fat Man and Little Boy, starring Paul Newman, Dem, now twenty-two, provides a grown-up, politically savvy variation on the imperiled good-girl type as a nurse stationed at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. And with Lynch's Wild at Heart, now finishing production, she's definitively crossing over from the realms of goodas-gold. She plays Lula, a young woman on the lam with her ex-con lover (Nicolas Cage) in an American odyssey filled with a Lynch mob of grotesques. Lula, she says, "is—hold on—a sex bunny.. .this feisty, southern, sexual little cat.. .I'm, like, going out there, you know, into the danger zone, and David's totally letting me do it. "

BEN BRANTLEY