Rose McGowan is careening through the streets of Los Angeles in a limousine, chatting about rock ‘n’ roll revolution and complaining about 50-year-old male film critics “just not getting it.”

Her latest movie, the deviantly dark high-school comedy Jawbreaker is receiving mixed reviews. In it she plays a tart-tongued prom queen who dresses to kill — literally.

“Jawbreaker is really fun, kick- a– and deviant,” she says. “I’m really evil in it, which is always fun. I think my character in Jawbreaker is kind of transcendent because she’s completely amoral, like Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven.”

If McGowan, 23, is known onscreen as a renegade suburban siren, offscreen she’s gained notoriety for playing Hollywood provocateur. Her most memorable prank of 1998 came when she accompanied her boyfriend (now fiance) Marilyn Manson to the MTV Music Video Awards wearing only a G-string and a body-baring mesh gown.

“I thought it was funny,” she says. “All those people do is talk about your damn dress anyway, no matter what you’re wearing. So it was like, `Ha-ha, take this one.’ ”

“Rose inspires me,” says Manson, who admits that he’s biased. “She’s got more b– than the Jennifer Love Hewitts of the world, who are so watered-down and boring. I told her she should change her name to Rose Hate-McGowan.”

PERVERSE SENSE OF HUMOR

McGowan and Manson share a perverse sense of humor, a pair of flatulent Boston terriers named Bug and Fester and a home in Los Angeles where all is bliss, almost.

“Food is one of our only issues,” McGowan says. “Lately I’ve been living on Red Vines, crackers and cheese. I like brie, but my boyfriend likes Cracker Barrel. He’s total white bread and I’m seven-grain.”

Born in Florence, Italy, McGowan spent her first nine years in the same Children of God commune as River Phoenix before moving to Colorado. For an interim month, she was left with her grandmother in Gig Harbor, Wash.

“My first day off the plane she sat me down at the organ and taught me to play `America the Beautiful.’ She fed me bologna sandwiches. I had some major culture-shock issues.”

THE JOY OF SELF-OBSESSION

Not that she has anything against culture shock. It’s one of the things she loves most about living in Los Angeles: “Everyone here is self-obsessed, and there’s a lot of freedom in self-obsession. It means nobody bothers you.”

It was while vacationing there four years ago that McGowan, whose only film credit was Encino Man, met underground filmmaker Gregg Araki, who cast her in Doom Generation. She subsequently appeared in several forgettable films before breaking out in “Scream” as a blonde who gets filleted by an electric garage door.

Like her character in Jawbreaker the role was the antithesis of McGowan’s own teenage experience.

“I wasn’t the popular, uppermiddle-class girl I play in those films. I remember looking at girls like that from the outside — me with my crazy mom in her beat-up VW bug and everyone else in their perfect wood-paneled station wagons,” she says. “Being different has been my main experience in life.”

From the limousine-end of the phone line comes the sound of a door opening and a gaggle of excited voices closing in. McGowan has arrived at wherever it is she’s going, but she has a parting thought before hanging up.

“Someday I’ll get my Antigone. You have to work to carve out your own little corner, and I’m certainly smacking my head against the wall trying to make a dent.”

She laughs. “I just hope I don’t get brain-damaged before I get there.”