''Drugs are a manifestation of the problem, but the real problem is the wound,'' says Mercedes Ruehl, who plays Kathleen, Gia's emotionally distant and clueless mother. ''In the screenplay, we have a mother with a narcissistic wound and a daughter who is narcissistically wounded herself, from a kind of heartbreaking neglect. They're both having to get through the day with massive tricks of denial.''

The result of that short-circuited relationship between Gia and Kathleen, who abandoned her daughter for a time when Gia was 11, is at the heart of the film.

In the late 70's, as the dark-haired, dark-eyed teen-age daughter of a South Philadelphia hoagie shop owner, Gia began modeling almost by accident. A local photographer saw her on the dance floor and asked her to pose. Soon she was sought out as a startling alternative to the blond, blue-eyed standard of the day, and by the time she was 18, when she landed her first major advertisement, for Gianni Versace, she was earning $100,000 a year. In 1980, after she had become the ''top girl'' at Wilhelmina Models in New York, she was expected to earn five times that much.

But inside, haute couture's reigning ideal of feminine beauty felt like a fraud. Away from the camera, she dressed in black leather motorcycle jackets and men's apparel from vintage clothing stores. She was an aggressive lesbian, coming on to models who roomed with her on faraway photo shoots. And once her drug problem got out of hand, she funneled her anger into frightening macho behavior, jumping through a car windshield when she found a female lover with a male friend, and pulling a knife on anyone she thought had slighted her.

When the track marks on her arms started showing up in pictures (other models called her Sister Morphine), only Mr. Scavullo continued to use her. Toward the end of her life, she was reduced to selling jeans in a Pennsylvania shopping mall and finally to living on the streets of New York.

In her prime, Gia sparked a rough-and-tumble reputation for walking out of sessions when a photographer kept her waiting, or when the hypocrisy of an assignment ticked her off. But to some, her free-spirited attitude was symptomatic of her search for truth, and every bit as seductive as her beauty. It's that attitude that Ms. Jolie, the 22-year-old daughter of Jon Voight, hoped to get on film.