Neat event tonight at 7:30 at 92Y Tribeca: a screening of “The House Bunny” tonight, under the aegis of Joan’s Digest, followed by a panel discussion moderated by its editor, Miriam Bale, and featuring Tad Friend, of this magazine (who wrote a Profile of Anna Faris last year that paid particular attention to this movie), and the writers Melissa Anderson, Jessica Winter, and Marisa Meltzer.

I wrote about the movie at the time of its release, in 2009, praising Faris as “a Judy Holliday for our times.” Holliday captured both the feet-on-the-ground practicality and the spontaneous idealism underlying the ostensible ditziness with which imaginative women stuck in ordinary circumstances were labelled. But “The House Bunny” has turned out to be less significant as a leap ahead in Faris’s career than as the launching pad for her second banana, Emma Stone (whose performance I also singled out), for a strange and simple reason: Stone, not Faris, is closer in style and in substance to the modern young-woman viewer. Stone triumphs as an endearing nerd, someone whose professional prospects are richer than her romantic ones—and who learns, in the course of the movie, to use traditional feminine wiles and styles to enrich her love life.

My problem with the movie is that I like the “before” version better—as I did with Mia Thermopolis (Anne Hathaway), in “The Princess Diaries,” who I think looked better before her royal makeover (under the tutelage of her grandmother, the Queen, played by Julie Andrews). Of course, the fact that I feel this way explains precisely why Stone’s character needed the House Bunny’s makeover: otherwise, she’d have gone through school only able to choose from among geeks like me. I’m not being falsely self-deprecating, but suggesting that the underlying point of Stone’s role here—and in pretty much every other movie of hers, notably “Easy A” and “Crazy, Stupid, Love”—is that intellectual achievements aren’t enough without the personality and the social aplomb to inform them with real-world experience—without the ability to walk on the wild side. Stone offers the female counterpart to the boys of “Superbad” (in which she plays Jules) who learn that there’s no such thing as theoretical knowledge (that porn is useless beside the unpredictable and often painful and comical fumblings of actual relationships).

When I saw “Easy A,” I surmised (here, last year) that Stone “has ably filled the cinematic vacuum left by Lindsay Lohan’s indisposition,” but really the two actresses, who are just a year apart in age, are significantly different. Emma Stone couldn’t have played Cady in “Mean Girls” because she’d have had trouble persuading viewers that she could be accepted by the Plastics. Unlike Stone, Lohan has a preternatural, and natural, emotional sophistication that gives her a strange simulacrum of maturity, a kind of adult knowingness even in innocence (the secret behind her success in “Freaky Friday”). On the one hand, that sophistication reminds me of high-school girls I knew who seemed too old too young—and who came to grief. On the other, Stone takes the relay baton from Lohan as Jonah Hill has from Seth Rogen: the fluttery fragility of Stone and Hill has an ethical element that’s very much of the moment.

Jean-Luc Godard spoke of starlets with “nothing to sell but their youth”; in “42nd Street,” the aging star tells the ingénue Peggy Sawyer that “the public wants youth, freshness, beauty.” But Hollywood has a glut of young actresses who have more than that to offer—they have talent, and that talent isn’t being put to full use in Hollywood movies. I’m thinking of Kat Dennings, whose turn in “Charlie Bartlett” and co-starring role in “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” should have gotten her a starring role in the story of a young professional on the way up (I likened her diction to that of a Woody Allen heroine), and Krysten Ritter, who stole “Confessions of a Shopaholic” from Isla Fisher, in 2009 (she has great brio and a mercurially antic temperament, and now, finally, she has a starring role, in “Vamps” (no release date) as well as in the TV series “Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23,” but she’s twenty-nine, and it’s about time).

The problem brings to mind Kierkegaard’s great 1847 essay “The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress,” in which he contrasts the gifts of the young actress (“luck,” “youthfulness,” “soulfulness,” and being “in the right rapport with the tension of the stage”—which I take for the theatrical equivalent of “the camera loves her”) with the “dialectical” element of acting, the “metamorphosis” that she undergoes when, no longer young, “in full and conscious, well-earned and dedicated command over her essential powers, she can in truth be the handmaiden of her idea.” I think immediately of Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Ida Lupino, and many others—actresses in an age when the idea was dominant, above all, the idea of adulthood. Now, the very question of the passage from youth to adulthood is the crucial issue of art—that’s why Hollywood has such trouble dealing with it, and why these actresses haven’t really had the roles they deserve. It’s become largely the province of independent filmmaking, the reason that Lena Dunham’s movie “Tiny Furniture” and her TV show “Girls” and Greta Gerwig’s style of performance, (in particular, her starring role in Whit Stillman’s forthcoming film, “Damsels in Distress”) are of such significance. About which, more soon.