Rosario Dawson, Exercising Squatter's Rights to Mimi

Rosario Dawson had a special affinity for her "Rent" role. (Revolution Studios)

NEW YORK Rosario Dawson pined so hard for the film role of Mimi, the HIV-infected strip club vixen of "Rent," that she nearly skipped the audition. It just meant so much to her that the idea of vying for the part and not getting it seemed crushing.

"I got freaked out because what if my voice broke while I was dancing because I was out of breath or something," Dawson says, sitting cross-legged on a couch in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Battery Park.

Why the anxiety? Because Dawson, like Mimi, hails from the Lower East Side, and she, like Mimi, lived there in an apartment without heat or electricity. Nobody expects the cast of any musical production to have firsthand knowledge of the world they are pretending to inhabit, and it's no knock on anyone else in the film that he or she is guessing at what it would be like to dwell in poverty-stricken New York in the mid-'80s. But those are Dawson's roots.

"We had a big, gaping hole in the middle of the floor when we moved in," she remembers. "Sheets of plastic on the windows. At first there was no running water, no heat, no electricity. My mother learned to be a plumber and put in all the pipes in our place."

The way Dawson describes the experience, it all sounds kind of exciting. Then again, this woman could make a tax audit sound festive. Dawson, 26, is enthusiasm incarnate and speaks in gushers, bouncing from topic to topic, with barely a pause to inhale. She smiles, flips back her short black hair every few seconds and talks, a few paragraphs at a time.

Which is what she's been doing all day. The publicity operation for "Rent" has taken over a suite and a bunch of rooms in the Ritz-Carlton and the whole scene -- a combination of walkie-talkies, sofas and finger food -- looks mildly paramilitary, like a SWAT team from the Pottery Barn. A handful of women are carefully coordinating the arrival and departure of stars and journalists.

"Seth, you copy? Go to XM in two minutes," one barks.

"Take Adam back to 1233," says another.

At 3 p.m., Dawson is in Room 909 and looks likes she's just getting warmed up.

"I don't really ever lose my voice," she says. "I'm actually lucky about that."

Whatever that mysterious quality called "it" is, this woman has by the heaps.

"When I saw the first cut of the movie," recalls "Rent" director Chris Columbus, "I remember seeing this close-up of Rosario and thinking, 'This is the birth of a new movie star.' "