By Jack Garner
Democrat and Chronicle film critic

NEW YORK CITY (June 12, 1998) -- Chloe Sevigny says she wouldn't have much patience with the naive girl she plays in The Last Days of Disco.

"I'd want to shake her and tell her to wake up!" the actress says. "Fortunately, she eventually comes into her own in the film."

The 22-year-old Sevigny is also coming into her own. Though the mainstream public may not know her work in the tough, hard-to-watch Kids (1995) or the obscure Trees Lounge (1996), the movie industry is becoming more aware of her unique screen presence.

And her new film, The Last Days of Disco, may give her more public exposure.

A friendly, free-spirited blonde with the sort of piercing eyes that look through you, Sevigny says she fell into acting as a teenager on her own in New York City.

Though she was raised in upscale Darian, Conn., she was always a bit of a rebel.

"I had a shaved head in high school, and then, when it grew back in, I dyed it orange," she says.

"Then I pierced my own nose with a huge safety pin."

Clearly enjoying the way her interviewer is squirming, she adds, "You do it by sticking a huge carrot up your nose.

"That's when my parents threw me out, though they later said I could come back. Actually, my parents are great."

Sevigny fled to Brooklyn Heights when she was just 17, finding work as a seamstress. She later took design classes at Parsons School of Design and worked as a costumer on independent film projects.

"But I also hung out in Washington Square Park, where I met Harmony," she says.

She's referring to Harmony Korine, a young writer who parlayed their adventures in the park with other adolescents into the screenplay for Kids, the incendiary film about teen promiscuity.

Sevigny now lives with Korine in the Gramercy Park area of New York -- and will have a small part in his forthcoming film.

"I play a girl who gets pregnant," she says, laughing at the idea that every time she has sex in a movie, she gets into trouble. (In Kids, she contracts AIDS; in The Last Days of Disco she gets a venereal disease.)

But in real life, her career is healthy -- even if she isn't yet a household name.

"I'm not interested in rocketing stardom," she says. "It's hard to make people believe in the characters you play when you're a star.

"When I'm in People magazine, I'll feel my career is over," she adds. "That sort of stardom would scare me."