BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Welsh actor Rhys Ifans exuded an appealingly shaggy, Scooby Doo quality as he strolled into a room full of reporters last spring to chat about his movie, “Greenberg,” and his role as an erstwhile rock guitarist turned regular, middle-aged family guy.

With a weeks-old growth of scraggly beard and a beaten black leather jacket worthy of any rock road warrior, the lanky, long-haired actor confidently spanned the gap between his two lifelong passions – acting and rock ’n’ roll.

In “Greenberg,” Ifans (whose name, absent its tongue-tying Welsh inflections, is pronounced Reese Ee-vans) is cannily cast in the part of Ivan, a one-time guitar god who hung up his axe years ago when his temperamental pal and bandmate Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) scuttled their group’s chance at a big-time record deal.

In the film’s story, Ivan and Greenberg are reunited after years of separation and silent resentment over their glancing flirtation with fame and fortune.

“Greenberg” is due out on DVD on July 13. In addition, Ifans plays a key role as narrator in the graffiti-hipster documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” which comes to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art’s Noble Theater July 23-25. He’ll also appear in this summer’s “Nanny McPhee Returns” and in the hotly anticipated “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows: Part 1” later this year.

Ifans, 41, who in his own younger days had a serious brush with rock fame in a Welsh band known as the Super Furry Animals, declared during press interviews hosted by Focus Features that he was uniquely suited to play Ivan.

“I’m in a band now, you know. I’ve been in and out of bands for years, so music is always around me,” he said. “There’s a special bond with that whole band thing, and also with the halcyon days of youth. Ivan and Greenberg hadn’t seen each other in 10 years. So the breakdown in their relationship happens because the language or vernacular they have is one of a student. They don’t have the grammar to talk about these big adult issues, such as divorce or not seeing your son again. They can only resort to, ‘hey, man, how you doin’.’ That’s a testament to (filmmaker) Noah Baumbach’s writing that these guys keep hitting the brick walls of communication because they might have grown up as people but the language they use hasn’t changed. And they hit that stumbling block every time.

“I think you can see them both struggling throughout the entire film trying to address the unspeakable,” he said. “That is often comedic but essentially it’s very sad. That’s the poetry I drew from this film – the pathos of the great unspoken.”

Ifans, whose breakout role came in 1999’s “Notting Hill,” in which he played Hugh Grant’s wacky, slovenly flatmate, Spike, is a classically trained theater actor who also considers himself a serious working musician. And he believes that each artistic discipline informs the other.

“You’ve gotta work on the factory floor before you sit around the big table,” he said. “I think my theater work informs my music work more than my film work, in terms of mechanics of performance. But, of course, they’re each completely different animals. I’d rather perform in a play, but I’d rather watch a film.”

But working on a Noah Baumbach film, he said, was an especially challenging experience even for a traditionally trained actor.

“It’s impossible to act in a Noah Baumbach film, you know, to ‘act,’” he said. “But no matter how improvised or free it seems, it actually isn’t. It really is a precision endeavor. It’s really finite work, which I found thrilling, because often I’m asked, ‘OK, you’re the funny guy, run with the ball, let’s improve,’ more often than not, a badly written script. ‘Let’s get Rhys to make it funnier.’ In this case that wasn’t true at all.

“That’s why it’s such a pleasure to work with such loving attention to language,” he said. “Every single utterance in this film has gravitas or weight or informs the audience further as to the emotional life of these people. There’s no waste and I just found that very, very rewarding.”

Luckily, Ifans said, he’s never been forced to choose between acting and music.

“Oddly enough, they coincide beautifully in my life,” he said. “I just make them both work. I don’t go on holiday. When I’m not acting, I do rock ‘n’ roll. Yeah, I guess with the Super Furry Animals early on there was a point where we were going to be signed by Creation Records and I had to decide, and it took me a year to – and, of course, my acting career wasn’t what it is now, so the future was an unknown entity. I made the right decision for me by not signing. But now we’ve kind of come back together with elements of the Super Furry Animals, and we’re on our second album.”

(His current band is a psychedelic group called The Peth – Welsh for “The Thing” – which is led the Super Furry Animal’s drummer Dafydd Ieuan. Its debut album, “The Golden Mile,” was released in 2008.)

Greta Gerwig

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Greta Gerwig has been characterized as “the Meryl Streep of mumblecore.”

Thus far, the tall, blond 26-year-old Gerwig has exercised her considerable talents as an actress – as well as a writer and director – on the far fringes of movie fame, in the obscure realm of ultra-low-budget indie films known as mumblecore. Hardly a stage that puts her on par with the estimable Hollywood acting dynamo Streep.

But judging from her performance in Noah Baumbach’s astringent new comedy-drama “Greenberg,” in which the lithe actress glammed down and pudged up to play Florence Marr, an aimless 20-something groping hopefully toward an uncertain future, Gerwig is on her way to big things on the big screen.

Having cut her moviemaking teeth on barebones indie films (her first film, made while she was a senior at Barnard College, had a total budget of $3,000), Gerwig marvels at the luxury of working on a Hollywood movie set.

“I actually had my own trailer, and there was a craft services table with real food, not just packaged snacks,” Gerwig said with guileless awe during press interviews hosted by Focus Features.

In early films, such as “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” “LOL” and “Nights and Weekends,” Gerwig and fellow actors relied heavily on improvised dialogue to create a sense of realism in their austere, slices of life. In other words, they often made it up as they went.

But the highly literate Baumbach (“The Squid and the Whale”) is known to be a stickler for precise dialogue that follows his scripts word for word.

“This was completely scripted,” Gerwig said. “There’s not a word in the film that’s improvised.”

And for her, that was a great relief.

“It was actually a great gift, and something that I’d been looking for as an actress,” she said. “When I’d been in plays in high school and college, I always had a strong sense that well-written plays are very rhythmic. So if you miss even a single word it would sound strange. So when I started working on this script, it was so nice to tap into that.

“The scenes are quite long and the (director of photography) would set up cameras so that we might do six or seven pages of dialogue in a row,” she said. “It felt like little vignettes, and you always knew the dialogue was there to save you. It was like tapping into a frequency and everyone was on it.”

Gerwig’s slightly dumpy Florence is a lost soul who vaguely aspires to a singing career while biding her time as a personal assistant to an affluent Hollywood Hills family. It’s there that she strikes up an offbeat relationship with Ben Stiller’s aimless, 40-something Roger Greenberg.

In auditioning for the role, Gerwig said she was something of a hopeful novice tentatively venturing into a grown-up world from the safe confines of mumblecore.

Of her first interview with Baumbach and co-producer Jennifer Jason Leigh, she said, “I thought it had gone well, but I didn’t really believe I would get it. I hoped that maybe I could be friends with them. I wasn’t thinking all that clearly. And then my agent started calling me and telling me all the movie star girls who wanted the role.”

Gerwig said she believes she got the part because she identifies so strongly with Florence and her feeling of being caught in limbo between college life and real life.

“I thought, I know this girl,” she said. “I felt my heart go out of my chest and into her. I think there is some Florence in me but as a person I’ve built up more defenses, so that a big part of my work in being Florence was not a building up, but a breaking down.”

With the release of “Greenberg,” Gerwig senses that she’s moving up to a higher level of moviemaking.

“The next thing I do will not be tiny,” she said. “It’s been a really strange experience because for the first time in my life, because this film is getting some momentum, I’m being offered work that I’m turning down, which I’ve never done before.

“I don’t want to stop making tiny films, and I really don’t intend to,” Gerwig said. “Someone like Chloe Sevigny keeps making films because she believes in them. I don’t think I’m leaving behind something as much as trying to straddle two worlds.”

James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – James Murphy knows what it’s like being a struggling musician finally breaking out of underground obscurity to find mainstream success.

Long a fixture on the downtown Manhattan music scene, Murphy and his band, LCD Soundsystem, have grown to international acclaim and Grammy recognition with such underground hits as “Losing My Edge” and “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House” from their 2005 debut album.

These days, Murphy finds himself breaking into a new musical fraternity – an elite one that’s welcomed other pop music stars such as Elton John, Phil Collins, Danny Elfman, Randy Newman and Mark Knopfler. Murphy’s first foray into film scoring is now on display in “Greenberg,” a new comedy-drama from filmmaker Noah Baumbach.

Murphy, an unassuming guy with a blue-collar attitude, said during a recent round of press interviews for the film that he knew nothing about movie scoring when he and Baumbach first met.

“I had no preconceptions,” he said. “But early on Noah asked, ‘do you know anything about scoring,’ and I said, ‘no.’ And he said, ‘great.’ And as it turned out, the way we did it was the only way I think I could have done it”.

And the way they did it was decidedly unconventional.

“Noah and I talked and he said was interested in not making a score but in just having me write songs,” Murphy said. “I tend not to like scores. I do like old scores that are very specific, but usually contemporary scores drive me crazy. They tend to be like the musical equivalent of a poetry slam, just mood tones and spacey surround-sound stuff.

“So I wrote a bunch of songs that are not directly about the movie but are like songs that we would pick out of our record collections to illustrate the movie,” he said. “We would just go back and forth and I would get scenes that Noah needed cues for – these are new words I’ve learned, ‘cues’ – and what I started doing was quickly making things that felt, like, not for scenes. I would just start making stuff and bringing it over. And he was incredibly gracious and would go, ‘oh, we’ll just try that there. Oh, I like that.’ Only a few songs were written specifically for scenes. Almost everything else was made as, like, a song. Like I would write a song. I would write it very roughly and bring it over, and then those roughs became what we became attached to.

“That became a habit of working,” Murphy explained. “Like I would make a song and then we would break it into score. So, like here’s the song, I would play it on piano and sing it. Then we’d do an acoustic guitar version. Somehow it worked, and that’s the only way I think I could have done it.”

“Greenberg” features seven new James Murphy songs, with vocals – many of which range far afield from the sound familiar to fans of LCD Soundsystem. The film’s soundtrack is due for release on Tuesday.

Murphy’s unconventional approach to film scoring earned a nod of approval from one particular cast member who knows a thing or two about movies and music. Actor Rhys Ifans, who appears in the film as a former rock guitarist, is in his offscreen time a working musician, once with the Super Furry Animals and now with a Welsh band called The Peth.

“I think James’ work here is fantastic,” Ifans said. “I don’t really like soundtrack movies. It really depresses me when a film company will just hook up with a record company and say, ‘hey, what’s new. Let’s throw it in, and let’s make some money on the CD sales.’ I think (the ‘Greenberg’ score) is very sensitively done. What it does is supply a heartbeat which is at once Greenberg’s but is also Los Angeles. There’s a hum that seems to go through the film via the music that becomes mantric almost.”