If, god forbid, there’s a natural disaster in L.A. in the near future, Jena Malone might be one of your first responders.

“I’ve been studying Community Emergency Response Team training,” the actor-musician, 41, said, drinking coffee in the living room of her home overlooking pomegranate trees and a canyon in northeast L.A. “Whether it’s fire management or building a neighborhood tool shed, it’s less important for me to hit career milestones now than to transform how I live on this planet. Let’s build something where we’re all taking care of each other’s needs through mutual aid.”

Those are galvanizing priorities from Malone, who’s led generationally beloved films like the sci-fi noir “Donnie Darko,” played the axe-chucking Johanna Mason in two “Hunger Games” tentpoles and recently co-starred in the lesbian bodybuilding revenge flick “Love Lies Bleeding.” For almost as long, she’s also made experimental folk and electronic records that toy with avant-garde noise and quietly poignant songwriting.

This is a wild time in L.A. for anyone concerned about the city and its culture industries, and Malone is deeply invested in both. Just before the release of her new Netflix series, the Duffer Brothers-produced “The Boroughs,” she’s released her first album in nearly a decade. “Flowers For Men” is an effects-shredded, future-primitive record, written after the birth of her son upended her obligations — and expectations — toward the men in her life and the world they’ll inherit.

“It changed everything,” Malone said, about raising a son. “I grew up learning to thrive and mask in masculine spaces. Grind culture is a masculine toxicity that I inherited and indoctrinated myself in. But parenthood offers you this opportunity to burn your entire life down in sacrifice to finding out what’s real. I had no idea what it was to be a man. All of my ideas burned down and not much was being raised back up.”

For millennial film fans, Malone’s been a consistently compelling, trust-anything-she’s-in actor since her child-star turn in 1997’s “Contact.” Few embody a tortured, beguiling Americana quite like her.

“The Boroughs” — a high-profile follow-up to “Stranger Things” from the masters of unreality, created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews — has a stacked cast that includes Alfred Molina, Geena Davis and Bill Pullman, set amid a bucolic retirement community under supernatural threat. A ragtag group of Duffer Brothers misfits teaming up to fight off eldritch horror might be the last safe bet in television.

Yet that’s also how Malone feels about the current climate of Hollywood — a once-stable neighborhood fending off malign forces. Institutional consolidation and retreat, spiraling costs, technological upheaval — they all add to a creeping sense that an era is over, and worse is coming.

“Film is in such a delicate transition. I think that where music was 20 years ago, film is now,” she said. “It’s like being on an elevator where every floor is on fire. A lot of the things that I loved about it no longer exist, even if what I love about it is still wildly potent. My stress levels go down and my creativity goes up when I’m building a world that does not rely on the film industry, even though it’s my main love.”

That feeling called her back to music on “Flowers For Men,” arriving nine years after her last LP. The ego-shattering experience of giving birth in 2016 and raising a son prompted reflections about what men’s inner lives were really like, and she wanted to write about them.

“I was raised by two moms, and I had this strange aspiration to become the dad,” Malone said, laughing. “I was the breadwinner of my family then. But being a parent was all brand-new to me. I kept seeing my father in him, my grandfather, these older relationships with men. It was asking me to look at him with curious, childlike eyes.”

“Flowers For Men” was written from a sincere curiosity about mens’ strictures, bad influences and better aspirations. To inhabit someone else’s life, she had to sound different, too.

The most prominent instrument on the album is its layers of vocal treatments. Malone has a lovely natural voice — intimately whispered, with hints of ‘70s country rock. But here she douses it in pitch-shifted digital acid, like a late 2000s R&B record dropped in the pool at the Joshua Tree Inn.

It’s an uncanny combo, but its lends modern melancholy to “Barstow,” which has the narrative structure of a Townes Van Zandt banger but is corroded with bleary effects. “Create In Your Name” has a Billie Eilish-worthy late-night murk, with lyrics so devotional they almost sound consumptive. “Disaster Zones” is all blown-out ambience, and the LP closes on a showstopping cover of John Prine’s classic “Angel From Montgomery.”

“I just love that a man wrote a song where the first line is ‘I’m an old woman,’” Malone said. “As a female songwriter, it gives me so much permission. Now all the doors are open. If I was to give flowers to all of the different men that have touched or changed things that deserve celebration, John Prine would be one of them.”

That idea — celebrating men for the good they’re capable of — felt transgressive enough today that it cohered the album for her. But it also came with questions about how romantic partnership fit into her life. Settling into motherhood, she read up on relationship anarchy — which she sees as not abiding by tiers of connection. She bought books on ethical nonmonogamy (“Sex at Dawn” was a big one) to learn how other lives were not just possible, but maybe even more fulfilling.

(Perhaps this was not a stretch from an actor who played the wild child Lydia Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice.”)

“I had been under this societal understanding that hierarchical love, placing one partner above everything else, was the ultimate romantic expression. I could name hundreds of movies that brought that up,” she said. “But while I’m learning to take care of this child, I’m realizing that self-love is one of the most important parts of this equation. I need to have expression, some work in life that felt like another love. And then my family, and how important friends were. And all of a sudden there’s no world where I would just have one love, not even just romantic love.”

“I had been under this societal understanding that hierarchical love, placing one partner above everything else, was the ultimate romantic expression. I could name hundreds of movies that brought that up,” Malone said. “But while I’m learning to take care of this child, I’m realizing that self-love is one of the most important parts of this equation. I need to have expression, some work in life that felt like another love.

(Evan Mulling/For The Times)

“Flowers For Men” is, in her way, a bargain with that contradiction — to love men deeply, but never put them above all else, even as she got engaged to her partner, actor Jack Buckley, earlier this year.

She’s still sorting out how to present this album live. She said she’s a fan of the Dead City Punx model of renegade shows in forgotten corners of L.A. Maybe as the city seems to fall apart, she’ll find a leafy park or the back of a dingy bar that’s the right home for these strange, lonely yet hopeful songs.

“I want someone to walk into the bathroom and be like, ‘Whoa, why is there a woman singing to me?’” Malone said. “I like the idea that art makes you a little uncomfortable and you don’t have the previously held expectations to know how to hold it.”

Billie Eilish fans prepare yourself,  the much talked about secret project has finally arrived on the big screens!

Billie Eilish has always been about intimacy over artifice, but her latest concert film takes that to a visceral new level. Co-directed by Eilish and James Cameron, Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D) manages to bridge the gap between a massive stadium show and the quiet grit of life backstage.

The film starts 18 minutes out from the show and builds the tension until audiences are literally folded into a box with her. Being taken under the stage, passing fans who have no idea she’s inches away, sets a tone of total immersion. What makes this film different is the balance between the spectacle and the behind-the-scenes reality. We see the creative shorthand between Billie and James Cameron as they chase what she calls the “best kind of sensory overload”.

The film is very much fan focussed, with the sound mix being so specific that you can hear individual fans singing along in sync with the visuals.

There are so many standout moments, the handheld camera work during “Bad Guy” that gives a dizzying POV of the band, and the chilling minute of silence Billie requests from the crowd to record a vocal loop.

The film captures her unique stage presence. Influenced by rap culture, Billie refuses to have anyone else on stage, unlike many female artists that use back up dancers. Billie can hold the entire stadium in awe by herself which is incredible to witness, until Finneas joins her for a beautiful, emotional piano set.

Between the high-tech visuals and the “Puppy Room” (where she keeps rescue dogs for staff to decompress), the film feels incredibly personal. While the film doesn’t give us any new insights into Billie, Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D) is an enjoyable experience that elevates the tradition concert film.

“Yellowstone” and “The New World” actor Q’orianka Kilcher has taken legal action against filmmaker James Cameron, Disney and others she says used her likeness in the wildly lucrative “Avatar” film franchise without her knowledge.

Kilcher, 36, filed her complaint Tuesday in California Central District Court and is suing on numerous counts including misappropriation of likeness, invasion of privacy and interfering with possible financial gain. She is seeking an unspecified amount in damages and a jury trial. The parties involved in the making of the “Avatar” film series “commercially exploited [Kilcher’s] likeness in developing and continuing the Avatar franchise” and “systematically avoided alerting or crediting her,” the lawsuit states.

Disney and a legal representative for Cameron did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. Cameron’s production company Lightstorm Entertainment, a California-based laser scanning studio and a New Zealand-based VFX firm are also among the co-defendants.

The claim at the core of Kilcher’s lawsuit is that Cameron in 2005 “extracted, replicated and commercially deployed her facial likeness” from a photo of a 14-year-old Kilcher as Pocahontas in the Terrence Malick film “The New World” and used it to inform the facial characteristics of Neytiri, a key character in the “Avatar” franchise played by Zoe Saldaña. Cameron spoke of Kilcher’s influence on the character in an interview with French YouTube channel Konbini. In the video, published in 2024 and noted in the lawsuit, James references the original sketch work for Neytiri. “The source for this was a photograph that was in the L.A. Times as part of the promotion for ‘The New World,’” he said. “It’s a young actress named Q’orianka Kilcher, who played Pocahontas in ‘The New World.’”

He adds in the video: “This is actually her lower face. She had a very interesting face. And I wound up meeting her years later and I gave her a signed print of this [sketch].”

The lawsuit alleges that the final look of Neytiri featured in the “Avatar” films “was not a fleeting inspiration or vague homage; it was a literal transplant of a real teenager’s facial structure into a blockbuster movie character.” In the 2024 interview, Cameron said the model of Neytiri had come to resemble Saldaña after she was cast. The first “Avatar” film was released in 2009 and grossed more than $2.9 billion.

The complaint also claims that the design process for Cameron’s Na’vi character moved on without Kilcher’s consent and that she was not compensated for influencing Neytiri’s design, further alleging that the film team’s actions “violated child performer laws and privacy laws designed to protect minors.” According to the lawsuit, the team behind “Avatar” did not “even attempt to have Plaintiff audition for the role of Neytiri” and refused the actor after her agent attempted to book a reading for the sci-fi epic.

Kilcher accuses Cameron of “creating a misleading narrative that she was simply unavailable” to appear in the original “Avatar” film and of leading her on with the idea of potentially appearing in later “Avatar” movies. Cameron released “Avatar: The Way of Water” in 2022 and “Avatar: Fire and Ash” in 2025.

The lawsuit said Cameron and Kilcher crossed paths at a Hollywood environmental charity event in 2010 and he instructed her to later pick up a “surprise gift” at his production offices. According to the lawsuit, Cameron gifted Kilcher a framed and signed print of the original Neytiri sketch with the note: “Your beauty was my early inspiration for Neytiri. Too bad you were shooting another movie. Next time.” Kilcher said she found the note confusing at the time. She had also contacted Cameron over the years, but “nothing concrete materialized,” according to the lawsuit.

The 99-page complaint describes Kilcher as an Indigenous actor-activist, noting she is of Quechua-Huachipaeri heritage. The lawsuit also alleged Cameron’s actions were hypocritical of his films’ messaging and detailed public backlash Cameron and the films faced for its depictions of Native groups.

“The result was a highly lucrative film franchise that presented itself as sympathetic to Indigenous struggles,” the lawsuit said, “all while silently exploiting a real Indigenous youth behind the scenes.”

According to her complaint, Kilcher “learned of the betrayal Cameron had kept from her” in August 2025, after video of the filmmaker discussing Neytiri’s design came across her social media feed. She “was shocked, heartbroken, and felt utterly betrayed,” and was motivated to reexamine and scrutinize archival “Avatar” materials. That included behind-the-scenes footage featured in a recent Blu-ray DVD release and an “Avatar” production art book, which, according to the lawsuit, did not credit the actor. The suit includes several side-by-side photos of Kilcher in “The New World” and various Na’vi characters from “Avatar” material.

In addition to damages and a jury trial, Kilcher seeks a public statement acknowledging her contributions and correcting “any false or misleading statement about her,” and payment of profits attributable to the “unauthorized” use of the actor’s likeness and identity.