What if you took someone with Britney Spears's unfailingly wrong instincts about her image, tossed in a dollop of Meryl Streep's talent and gave her flowing red hair that morphed on a moment's notice to deepest black or fairest blond? You'd end up with a pretty good facsimile of Lindsay Lohan, whose tabloid-ready partying and shining on-screen talent seem headed for a collision, a crash bigger than the one last year that damaged the Mercedes she was driving (and that, she said, was caused by paparazzi).

At 19, she is at a turning point in her career. "Just My Luck," in which she plays a golden girl whose good fortune turns black, opens on Friday; it is the last of her teenage comedies. Soon she will be seen with Ms. Streep in Robert Altman's ensemble film "A Prairie Home Companion" (set to open June 9), and her next projects also shout serious actress.

She has completed the independent films "Bobby," about Robert Kennedy's assassination, and "Chapter 27," about John Lennon's killer, Mark David Chapman. Then she moves off the assassination beat with three more films, pairing her with Aaron Eckhart, Jane Fonda and Adrien Brody.

Yet when she was host of "Saturday Night Live" last month, a skit tweaked her reputation for all-night drinking at the hottest clubs and feuding with other starlets, as she lectured the drunken Easter Bunny for his wild partying. Her image couldn't be ignored.