Kristen Stewart’s status as the mopey face of gothic teenage angst in the “Twilight” franchise has easily overpowered the other achievements of her brief career. At age twenty, she has appeared in a number of thematically advanced character studies (“Adventureland” among them), suggesting the antithesis to the murky innuendo and hackneyed drama of the big screen vampire craze. More often than not, the “Twilight” movies downgrade Stewart’s talent from credible understatement to a plastic vision of post-adolescent frustration. In “Welcome to the Rileys,” the second feature from music video director Jake Scott, Stewart delivers the legitimate version of that archetype with a role that rejects commercial standards: She plays a 16-year-old stripper.

Gandolfini was also greatly impressed by Stewart, who between blockbuster Twilight episodes, has been building quite a gallery of lost-girl portraits in indies like The Yellow Handkerchief, The Runaways and Adventureland.

"She’s a young girl who reads," he marvels. "She’s questioning things and she works very hard to do things that mean a lot to her. I like Kristen a lot and admire her. Especially when I think of myself at that age — which was, y’know, ridiculous."

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"Welcome to the Rileys" director Jake Scott has used phrases like "emotionally naked" and "got dirty" to describe Kristen Stewart's performance in the film. The 20-year-old actress plays a broken young woman thrust into a life of stripping in a seedy club and selling her body in fetid motel rooms.

At the film's red-carpet premiere in Tribeca on Monday night, Scott continued to hit on those same themes of unvarnished emotionality, comparing KStew to one of the most critically lauded and emotionally expressive actresses in Hollywood.

"That's like Meryl Streep stuff, you know?" he told MTV News.