The Cineaste's Lament.

From New York Magazine’s Vulture site, here’s part of an interview with “On the Road” star Kristen Stewart. In it, she talks about shedding both the image of “Twilight’s” virginal Bella Swan and her clothes in Walter Sales’ adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s classic Beat Generation novel.

“Bella Swan, she ain’t — though when a reporter at the film’s press conference noted the difference between Stewart’s On the Road character Mary Lou and Twilight’s Bella, who doesn’t have sex before marriage, Stewart reminded him that randy Bella “really wants to!” As for taking part in those R-rated scenes, Stewart admitted, “I love pushing and I love scaring myself. To watch a genuine [sexual] experience onscreen is so much more interesting than when you see the tape holding up the pasties … As long as you’re being really honest, there’s nothing ever to be ashamed of.”

Certainly, there’s nothing regrettable about Stewart’s performance here: It reestablishes the promising character actress last seen in Into the Wild and held captive as Twilight’s leading lady for years. Though Stewart delivered a great turn as Joan Jett in The Runaways, she had been field-testing that performance in real life for so long before the movie came out — donning a black mullet, rocker sneer, and Minor Threat T-shirt on the red carpet and at Comic-Con — that audiences gave her little credit for it, assuming the character was not far removed from Stewart herself. Mary Lou is a different kind of thing entirely, though: Stewart makes eye contact instead of dropping it, and the lip-biting tics that the actress brought to Bella are all banished. Stewart’s honey-haired Mary Lou knows what she wants and goes after it, and Stewart gets to show off a confidently sensual side of herself, dancing with abandon and seducing at will.