In step with the offbeat

In the upcoming film rendition of Alan Warner’s 1995 novel “Morvern Callar,” Samantha Morton plays the enigmatic title character: a quiet girl with a boyfriend who slits his wrists on Christmas day and bequeaths her a finished novel and the gift of a mix tape.

The rest of this poetic, often beautiful, film unfolds with the music on that tape, letting the emotional content of the songs inform us about the emotional state of the mysterious girl. Both the premise and the character are deeply revealing for the eccentric Morton, 25, an up-and-coming British actress whose predilection for quirky roles is now morphing into star power in such films as “Sweet and Lowdown” and “Minority Report.”

Like the girl in the film, she is devoted to her music. She bridges the gap between the strangeness of acting and the strangeness of being Samantha Morton by listening to the music.

In the film, she smokes and grooves to the hypnotic sounds of Can, an experimental electronic group from the early ‘70s. A pivotal scene finds her leaning over the bathtub, kitchen knife in hand, in a pose of surreal beauty scored by the dulcet, trippy Velvet Underground ditty “I’m Sticking With You.”

And when Morvern strides across the floor of the supermarket where she stocks produce, the headphones stuck under her red wool hat play the Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra duet “Some Velvet Morning,” instantly infusing the mundane landscape with otherworldly grace and strangeness.

Collaborators have used similar words to describe the star of the film herself. Morton has “something not quite of this earth,” “Morvern Callar” director Lynne Ramsay recently told Britain’s Guardian. On screen, her physical appearance is a mix of ethereal beauty and coltish charm: a round child’s face and a wide forehead that suggest sincerity, translucent skin often stained rosy with tears, big blue eyes difficult to interpret, lips easily bruised with hurt.

She has worked with directors from Steven Spielberg (who cast her as a precognitive psychic in his futuristic dystopia “Minority Report”) and Woody Allen to Jim Sheridan, and she recently won a best actress British Independent Film Award for Morvern, a role she developed with the help of the soundtrack.

“I can’t do my job without music,” Morton said recently in a phone interview from London, where she lives. “When I’m in character, it does feel like a dance sometimes, even if I’m not moving, even if I’m as still as ... you know, death; it’s still a dance. It sounds very pretentious,” she added with proper British self-deprecation, “but I interpret most characters through music.”

“With ‘Morvern Callar’ it was easier for me to have an opportunity to listen to music while acting, as opposed to listening to music before the scene and then having to take off my headphones, as I normally do.”

This particular affinity for informing her performances through music cues has been apparent in almost all of her work.

In “Jesus’ Son,” she seduced the protagonist by shaking her bits to Tommy Roe’s early ‘70s bubblegum pop “Sweet Pea.” As Hattie, the mute Depression-era laundress from “Sweet and Lowdown,” her face lit up when her boyfriend Emmet Ray -- a kleptomaniac who was also the second-best jazz guitar player in the world -- casually strummed his guitar after they made love. Her performance in that film as a kind of lovely female Harpo Marx earned her an Oscar nomination. For the awards ceremony she donned a Sex Pistols T-shirt. She even played a mermaid in U2’s latest video, “Electrical Storm.”

Last month she DJd a music set for London radio station XFM. She volunteered that the track list “will give you a good insight into who I am.”

If that’s true, what do we know about Samantha Morton? She often takes off in the psychedelic funk rocket of the Stone Roses’ “Fools Gold.” She loves to swim in the melancholy of Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control.” She thinks, as Saint Etienne put it, that “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” And she is, simply, the Beatles’ “Girl.”

Given her predilection for using music as an emotional tool, “Morvern Callar” was a natural.

Morton fell in love with Morvern when she read the book several years ago. She lobbied resolutely with Ramsay for the part of the English girl living in a bleak seaside Scottish town who is determined to waltz through life according to her own, apparently random motives -- secretly disposing of the body of her boyfriend, passing his novel to literary agents as her own, using the money earmarked for his funeral to fund a vacation to Spain with her best friend. Through it all, the music serves as a kind of road map to the inner life of a protagonist who remains inscrutable throughout.

Her impulses, however, have a universal appeal, said Morton: “It’s that feeling of wanting to get away from what society has given you, from all that you’re supposedly meant to live up to.”

Even after portraying Morvern on screen, the actress said she has yet to really puzzle her out. She tries to avoid analyzing a character before or after shooting a movie. “I just be it,” Morton said simply. “I went much of the film like everybody else, receiving her. It was like breathing, almost doing nothing.

“Now, it’s over -- I have played other characters since then -- and I really miss her. I’d love to make ‘Morvern Callar 2.’ But I don’t think it will ever happen.”

Morton grew up in Nottingham in a large Polish-Irish family, her childhood marked by poverty and emotional turmoil. When she was 12, casting directors spotted her at the Central Junior Television Workshop, an after-school drama club where she was training, and offered her parts in TV shows. She dropped out of school at 16 and moved to London to embark on a full-time career as an actress.

Her first important film role came in 1997. Critics hailed her breakout performance as a young woman who embarks on wild sexual escapades as a means to cope with her mother’s death in Carine Adler’s “Under the Skin.”

Subsequent collaborations with women filmmakers -- Alison Maclean in “Jesus’ Son” and Ramsay in “Morvern Callar” -- proved equally auspicious.

Ramsay, a Glaswegian filmmaker from a working-class background, has only two features under her belt but has already cut a swath as one of Scotland’s visionary young artists. “She’s someone who inspires me greatly,” said Morton. “Lynne is a beautiful woman, a very sexy woman, very confident about herself. And that is very infectious. Being around her makes you feel powerful in your own species.”

The actress has made films in Israel, Spain and Britain but does not see her future confined to European indies. “I really enjoyed working in Hollywood,” she said. “I would go back there in a heartbeat, but it just has to be the right project.”

What would be the right project for one of the film world’s most evasive characters? A strong feminist statement? A descent into the heart of pop culture? More work about difficult or troubled women? As it turns out, yes on all accounts.

“I’d love to do an ensemble piece,” she says, “maybe ‘Charlie’s Angels.’ ”

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Morton filmography

“In America” (2003): Sarah, the mother, in a soon-to-be released saga about an Irish family that migrates to New York City.

“Morvern Callar” (2002): Morvern Callar, iconoclastic heroine who refuses to live out her predestined life in a bleak Scottish town.

“Minority Report” (2002): Agatha, psychic being who is an intrinsic part of a futuristic crime prevention unit.

“Jesus’ Son” (1999): Michelle, protagonist’s on-and-off heroin-addled girlfriend.

“Sweet and Lowdown” (1999): Hattie, the mute girlfriend of a Jazz Age musician; nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actress.

“Under the Skin” (1997): Breakthrough performance as Iris, a youth devastated by loss who seeks relief in sexual adventures.