Kat Dennings solves the mysteries of high school

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Kat Dennings has a thing for fiercely intelligent young women. Over the course of her career, the 24-year-old actress has been drawn to characters who are smarter, more self-assured and wiser than their peers.

"I do seem to like smart girls - I just do," Dennings said during a recent interview. "They're inspiring, and I enjoy it."

At first glance, her character in Canadian Michael Goldbach's directorial debut, Daydream Nation, may seem like one more brainy girl with beauty to match. Caroline Wexler has moved with her widowed father to a small town where her isolation only amplifies her teenage angst and ennui. Seeing in her high school English teacher the one person she might connect with, Caroline seduces him and finds herself in a love triangle with an awkward young classmate. Dennings's performance drives the film thanks not only to her character's world-weary smarts, but the vulnerability lurking beneath her veneer of self-confidence.

Getting inside the head of such a character is what attracted Dennings to the movie, which was shot in Vancouver.

"She's kind of an enigma. She's all these different things and she plays these different roles with the people in her life. So the question is, which one is really her?" the Philadelphia native says. "I was just really intrigued by the story and by her, and really just wanted to see what makes her tick."

Goldbach, who also wrote the film, was similarly inspired by that enigma. After co-writing Childstar with Don McKellar, Goldbach moved back to the small town he grew up in near London, Ont., to figure out his next project.

"I just thought, no one has really done a film about these small towns, about just what crazy places they are and what high school is like in these towns," he says. But that wasn't the question that got Goldblach writing the script. Instead, he says, the one he set out to answer was this: "What was going on with that girl in my class who's, like, really beautiful and always seemed to be involved with older men and always seemed to be trouble?"

Answering that was no easy task for Dennings. As someone who was home-schooled, she couldn't draw on her own experiences of life in high school. But that didn't stop her from delving in to the character. To do so, she says she listened to as much of the type of music she imagined Caroline would listen to and also read plenty of Colette, figuring Caroline would be drawn to the French author who mined the conflicts between love and independence in her novels.

While the role adds to the list of strong young women Dennings has already played, it is also a much more complex one, a challenge she sees as helping her to mature as an actor. Here, she finds herself on much more adult turf than in, say, Nick and Nora's Infinfite Playlist.

"The point of being an actor is to do different things," Dennings says.

Indeed, Daydream Nation may help her move from kid-friendly fare such as Shorts and the teen flicks she's starred in to more serious films, a move she began alongside Woody Harrelson as an underage prostitute in Defendor.

An indie darling, Dennings has been in her share of light-hearted movies, whether it's Big Momma's House 2 or The House Bunny. But as she gets older, she is increasingly attracted to darker material such as Daydream Nation.

"I really enjoyed the tone of the script. It was very ethereal and very dark and very mysterious, which I love," she says.

The movie is set largely in a high school, but it's hardly a teen movie. And though it may be courting controversy by having a high school girl in an affair with a teacher, Dennings says she is ready for it.

"Bring it on," she says. "That's just the way she wants to do things. This girl sees an opportunity to escape from her life right in front of her, and I don't think she thinks it through - she just does it."

While Dennings says she feels the pull of darker, more mature projects, she couldn't pass up the chance to play Natalie Portman's lab assistant in Kenneth Branagh's upcoming comic book adaptation, Thor.

"I would have done anything to be in Thor. I would have played anybody. I would have been the craft service guy," she says. "Besides the cast being so incredible, Kenneth Branagh is one of my favourite writer-directors. Getting to work with him was a privilege."