Kaitlyn Dever has breezed through a whirlwind of outfits in record time for our cover shoot. “There were a lot of socks with heels, which is one of my favorite things,” says the 22-year-old “Booksmart” actress, her delicate features still dusted with glitter. No surprise that she’s good at a quick change; Dever’s been through a lot of looks in the past decade, the mercurial choices of her teen years lived out on the red carpet.

She recently did a Marie Kondo-ing of her closet, passing eight bags of clothing down to her two younger sisters, Mady and Jane. “I’ve gone through so many weird phases, trying to decide what aesthetic I was going for,” Dever tells Alexa. Her sartorial journey included a goth stint complete with (she cringes to admit) a Criss Angel obsession, but that’s all behind her. “I think I’ve got it down now,” she says with a laugh. Today she’s Hollywood-hippie chic: Birkenstock clogs, a flowy white prairie-style dress and a vintage Hawaiian agricultural-school jacket she found at Urban Outfitters.

During our shoot, she played vintage (to her) music — from all the way back in the 1980s and ’90s. “I made this playlist for if I was having a bunch of people over,” she says. “I call it the ‘If You Wanna Be Freakin’ Cool’ playlist.”

And Dever is, without a doubt, freakin’ cool. After years of supporting roles on TV (“Last Man Standing,” “Justified”) and in indie film (“Short Term 12,” “Laggies,” “Beautiful Boy”), she’s taking center stage this year with two very different roles in two game-changing, female-led projects. First, there was this spring’s giddy raunch-com “Booksmart,” in which she and co-star Beanie Feldstein play studious high school seniors aiming to cram four years of missed partying into one night. The other is the gritty upcoming Netflix series “Unbelievable.” (Just for good measure, she also played an Appalachian Pentecostal in last month’s “Them That Follow,” alongside Walton Goggins, Oscar winner Olivia Colman and several large rattlesnakes.)

It’s hard to reconcile this mellow, confident person with the one I’ve just been watching in episodes of “Unbelievable,” where Dever plays a teenage rape victim bullied by detectives into recanting her story — and then taken to court for falsely reporting a crime. As Marie Adler, who’s seen more than her share of hardships even before the attack, Dever makes herself as physically and psychologically small as possible; Marie is someone trying her hardest to camouflage her very existence.

The masterful eight-part series, based on a ProPublica story and a subsequent episode of “This American Life,” also features Toni Collette and Merritt Wever as detectives working on rape cases that are eventually linked to Marie’s. It’s the antithesis of most serial-criminal dramas in its depiction of the assaults (all shot solely from the point of view of the victims) and its unflinching look at the way cops can get a rape investigation right — or very, very wrong.

“Getting to play Marie was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my career,” Dever says. “It’s part of why I want to be an actor, getting to tell stories that have been buried or that nobody knew about before.”

The young actress is already a Hollywood veteran, but she still managed to be star-struck by one of her co-stars. “Toni Collette, man … she’s the reason I started acting,” says Dever. “The first scary movie my parents let me watch was ‘The Sixth Sense,’ and her performance in that was just shocking to me. She was so real.” Dever and Collette don’t share screen time in the series, but when they crossed paths at a cast dinner, Dever saw her chance to spill the story. “I was kind of embarrassed, but people were like, ‘You need to tell her!’ I think she was very touched. That was really a cool thing, to get to tell her that.”

She’s also been on the receiving end of plenty of fan love since playing Amy in “Booksmart,” the directorial debut of Olivia Wilde. “It’s brought me to tears, things people have said to me, especially when they tell me what my character did for them — I give them a big hug.”

The movie (which has been compared to a female spin on “Superbad”) sees Dever playing “a queer character who wasn’t put in the film to be ‘the gay character,’” she explains, noting that’s still a huge rarity in mainstream film. We discuss the touching yet LOL sex scene between Amy and Hope (Diana Silvers), which breaks new ground in its willingness not to cut away from less than perfect moments — and, as Dever points out, to be the lone scene of its kind in the movie, rather than relegating Amy’s hookup to a side plot. “I feel like we’re always seeing sexy edits of everything” in typical love scenes, says Dever. “Here we see all of the awkward moments and the awkward things you say, all the stuff that comes with being a teenager in high school.”

Dever herself hasn’t lived a typical teen life, having been homeschooled through middle school and then part of an independent study program in high school in Los Angeles, where her family moved when she was 10. Her earlier childhood was never exactly normal, either: Her dad, Tim Dever, was the voice of Barney the purple dinosaur from 1999 to 2002, a plum job that required moving the family from Arizona to Texas, where Dever says she learned to love suburban living.

It was there that she first picked up the guitar, as a second-grader. “I remember watching Christy Carlson Romano on the Disney Channel, and she had this music video that would play all the time on a loop,” Dever says. “She would play this butterfly guitar, and I wanted to be her so bad.” When Christmas rolled around, and Dever found herself with her very own butterfly guitar, she threw herself into learning how to play — albeit not exactly with the Disney songbook. “The first song I learned,” she recalls, “was ‘Crazy Train,’ by Ozzy Osbourne.”

She graduated to songwriting and harmonizing with her sister Mady; the duo now call themselves Beulahbelle, and had an original song featured in the 2018 movie “Tully,” directed by Jason Reitman (a friend of Dever’s since he cast her in 2014’s “Men, Women & Children”).

“I was probably 17 or 18 when [Mady and I] first started playing out [at venues],”

Dever recalls. “My hands would be shaking, I’d be sick to my stomach, and I realized, oh, it’s because I’m just reciting my diary to a group of people,” she says. Despite the persistent nerves, she says, “I want to do it every day. We have a lot of really good songs, and we just recorded a single.”

When she’s not acting or singing, she hangs out with friends, many of whom are fellow actors (she recently Instagrammed a photo with pal Zoey Deutch, the two dressed in, respectively, Louis Vuitton and Dior for a Vanity Fair shoot). But her sisters will always come first. “We’re all really close; they’re my best friends,” Dever says. “I don’t know what I would do without them. We’re all living at home, still. I live in a little guest house at my parents’ place. I’m not quite ready to move out yet.”

She is, however, vowing to have more adventures when she’s off the clock. “I’m trying to get out and explore LA,” she says. From the way this year is going, though, it seems more likely she’ll have the city at her sock-heeled feet before long.

Editor: Serena French; Stylist: Anahita Moussavian; Hair: Bobby Eliot at SWA Agency using R+Co; Makeup: Molly Greenwald at SWA Agency using Pat McGrath Labs Manicure: Ashlie Johnson at The Wall Group.