The accidental 'It' girl

Think of her as an ingenue for the text-message set. With her offbeat allure, charm and sass, actress Greta Gerwig has become something of an indie-film sensation over the last two years after several of her movies played to swooning responses at such festivals as SXSW and Sundance. Since her insightful portrait of youthful uncertainty and anxiety as the title character in 2007's "Hannah Takes the Stairs" (the defining movie of the recent low-budget, dialogue-driven "mumblecore" film movement), she has seemed to be on the cusp of something bigger.

But not quite yet. In the new micro-budget horror-comedy "Baghead," currently in theaters, Gerwig plays Michelle, a twentysomething transplant to L.A. desperate for attention and connection. The character is by turns flighty and wily, determined to get what she wants even if she doesn't always know what that is, and provides an ideal launchpad for Gerwig's distinctively natural, goofy-yet-sultry screen presence.

"Baghead," a hybrid of mumblecore's character-based talkiness jump-started with genre kicks, follows four struggling actors as they set out to make a movie in the woods, only to find themselves terrorized by an unknown assailant. Michelle is in no small part a complicated creation of Gerwig's own devising, as filmmakers Mark and Jay Duplass, whose previous feature was 2005's small-scale hit "The Puffy Chair," allow their actors a wide berth through improvisation and collaboration.

Gerwig is something of the accidental "It" girl, a reluctant starlet whose first on-screen performance, in the 2006 film "LOL," consisted largely of saved voice mails she had left for her then-actual boyfriend. (Along with risque camera-phone pictures she took of herself for the movie in the bathroom of a university library.) Yet with her choppy blond hair, wide eyes and pouty mouth, she has one of those faces that the camera, at whatever the budget, just seems to like.

"The way I describe it is when I'm shooting, [the camera] just wants to go to her," said Jay Duplass, who besides being co-writer and co-director of "Baghead" also shot the film. "Greta, her face, like, glows."

"She's kind of her own secret weapon," said Mark Duplass in trying to define Gerwig's appeal. "She's got a lot of things working there and I'm still not exactly sure how it all computes, how all the pistons fire."