COOL GIRL COLOSSUS

Kirsten Dunst has been a child star, an ingenue, a fashion muse, and a leading lady. Now she's starring in one of the year's buzziest movies, prepping her next Coppola collab, and rewriting the rulebook for being a true Hollywood original.

- MICKEY RAPKIN

On the hottest day in recent memory, Kirsten Dunst is in no mood to shop. Her shoulders—exposed in a cotton shell—are turning pink, a paparazzo is maybe hiding behind that car, and she'd really like to sit down. “I need to decompress,” Dunst says. The reasons for that will soon become clear.

The plan was to go shopping for toys. It’s a bit of a gimmick: This fall Dunst stars opposite Channing Tatum in Roofman, a ripped-from-the-headlines story about an escaped convict who spends months hiding out inside a Toys R Us. Dunst plays Leigh Wainscott, the newly divorced, churchgoing store employee he falls in love with, apparently despite her employee uniform, which Dunst deems “not flattering” but right for the film.

If you don’t have kids—or you hire someone to do your holiday shopping—you may be surprised to find out that Toys R Us doesn’t exist anymore. At least, not the way you remember. There is one in Los Angeles, Dunst reports, but “it’s in the basement of a Macy’s.” She has been there to buy gifts and, well, “it’s a lot of sad dads sitting in the furniture department waiting.” Her description is so ripe with malaise it’s like a John Cheever story written for X.

So we visit a mom-and-pop toy shop, where Dunst picks up a Magic 8 Ball for her sons Ennis, seven, and James, four. She tells me that when she and her husband, the actor Jesse Plemons, recently saw a rough cut of Roofman, they kept turning to each other as if to say, “This is great, right?”

“I haven't felt that way leaving a theater in a long time,” Dunst says. She praises Tatum (who “moves like a dancer”) and adds, “It’s like a Hal Ashby movie.”