BLOOD, SWEAT AND SHEEDY; ACTRESS LEAVES HER BRAT PACK PERSONA BEHIND TO TACKLE EDGY JUNKIE-ARTIST ROLE IN `HIGH ART'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

Every time Ally Sheedy drifts on screen in the acclaimed new independent film ``High Art,'' our attention is riveted. Painfully thin, with a manner that oozes resignation and psychic agony yet also projects a steely sense of self-knowledge, Sheedy's dissolute Lucy Berliner has everything going for her, attention-getting-wise, that the movies love about self-destructive artists.

Yet there's something about Sheedy's performance that doesn't exploit the cliches, that places Lucy's drug abuse and misunderstood-genius angst within a natural, proportioned framework. It's an impressively well-judged job, the kind of spectacular, specific acting that feels lived, not created.

It's a long way from ``The Breakfast Club.'' And it's something the onetime Brat Pack star, now 36, had to go through certain hells in order to accomplish.

``A character who is this dark, who has a drug problem and a sort of death wish going on, there are just so many possibilities to get fussy and self-conscious playing her,'' says Sheedy, who's as animated and engaged as Lucy is tentative and zoned out. ``And there's enough in there that's really just a part of me and part of my entire experience of my life. I felt like all I had to do was be there, stay out of the way and let it just play.''

A few disclaimers here about the differences between Ally and Lucy. Sheedy long ago kicked an addiction to the prescription drug Halcion but has never had a Lucy-like heroin problem. The actress is happily married to New York stage actor David Lansbury and has spent most of the last four years being a hands-on mother to their daughter, Rebecca.

She confesses, though, to having had a toxic relationship with Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora that she claims informs Lucy's dysfunctional romance with a junkie German actress (played with languid wit by Patricia Clarkson). Sambora has disputed Sheedy's recollections about their time together.

Where Ally and Lucy really intersect, though, is in their take on art and commerce. Lucy is a photographer who went into a 10-year drug haze rather than cope with the compromises of New York's commercial art scene. Sheedy, whose editor mother raised her in Manhattan's literary world (Ally wrote a best-selling children's book, ``She Was Nice to Mice,'' at the age of 12), turned her back on Hollywood after appearing in a string of successful '80s movies: ``Bad Boys,'' ``WarGames,'' ``Breakfast Club,'' ``Short Circuit,'' ``St. Elmo's Fire.''

When she talks about Lucy's creative views, Sheedy can't help commenting on her own career as well.

``Lucy just takes pictures purely out of love, and the buying and selling of that would have destroyed her art,'' she says. ``As far as I'm concerned, that's exactly what happened to me here. Lucy has this line where she says, `I made it impossible for myself to continue,' and I made it impossible for myself to continue.''

Once the Brat Pack - a loosely associated cadre of young '80s actors that included Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Rob Lowe and future superstars Tom Cruise and Demi Moore, among others - lost its collective cachet, Sheedy, like many of her contemporaries, found it difficult to segue into more mature roles. She was especially hampered by her girl-next-door image, which prevented her from being seriously considered as both a Hollywood leading lady and - what she really wanted - in the burgeoning field of edgy, independent films.

``It was important for me to play more interesting characters that had more going on, that weren't simply sex objects,'' she explains. ``But because of the way I look, my outside and inside did not work together. I wanted more complex, darker, deeper work - and what was coming my way was so banal.''

After a few offbeat films that failed to succeed either artistically or at the box office, Sheedy retreated to her native New York, where she intensively studied her craft, did some stage work and returned to writing. A book of poems, ``Yesterday I Saw the Sun,'' was published in 1991, and she's just finished a satiric novel aimed at young adults.

To pay the bills, Sheedy has made a series of films for the USA cable network. ``High Art'' won acclaim at this year's Sundance and Cannes film festivals, but she actually overcame the Brat Pack onus with indie filmmakers a few years ago. Sheedy has appeared in five other low-budget productions, all of which are still seeking theatrical distribution.

It's nothing like the heyday of the John Hughes teen flick, but Sheedy loves it just the same.

``I don't want to be a Movie Star with a capital M and a capital S,'' she says. ``Acting is something that I really love to do, but the problem is that when you marry something that is creative with a business, it's a really uneasy marriage. To decide that you're going to become this huge commercial success, it usually means that you're going to have to do movies that appeal to the lowest common denominator and become grossly successful.

``I would be very content to find these kinds of roles in independent films and just keep working on them.''

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Photo: `A character who is this dark, who has a drug problem and a sort of death wish going on, there are just so many possibilities to get fussy and self-conscious playing her. And there's enough in there that's really just a part of me and part of my entire experience of my life. I felt like all I had to do was be there, stay out of the way and let it just play.'

Ally Sheedy

on her role as drug-addled photographer Lucy Berliner in ``High Art''