Rock chicks are cool. Especially the four rock chicks in Prey for Rock and Roll. They reek cool — not because of their grunge-wear or seductive snarls or titillating tattoos but because of their uninhibited, unmovable passion for the music. Joan Jett and Courtney Love have that passion, too — and they’re on a short list of women who’ve scaled the male-dominated punk peak.

It’s no climb for the faint-hearted.

Prey for Rock and Roll is a gritty film about chasing the elusive dream that tells the story of one rock chick’s turmoil when her dream doesn’t go exactly as planned.

Gina Gershon (Bound), Drea de Matteo (The Sopranos), Lori Petty (Relax … It’s Just Sex) and Shelly Cole (Gilmore Girls) play the tight-knit members of Clamdandy, an all-girl band that can’t get beyond regular gigs in unglamorous Los Angeles clubs.

Even though Gershon’s character is bisexual and Petty and Cole play a lesbian couple, one of the more refreshing aspects of this film is that sexuality never becomes an issue. In this neck of Los Angeles, people live and let live. It’s a perfect world — almost.

The band members lug their equipment to $50 gigs, rehearse in shabby back rooms and maintain the hope that some day they will “make it.” Jacki, the don’t-give-me-any-shit lead singer played convincingly by Gershon, is troubled by a nagging question: When do you let a dream die?

Approaching 40, she’s reevaluating her life, feeling burned out and irritated that she no longer strikes that youthful image that “sells.”

“I felt that was important to convey in the script,” says Gershon, whose butched-up look matches Jacki’s rock-bitch attitude. “That’s why I wrote the line where Jacki says, ‘And the fact that I have to fucking lie about my age pisses me off … unless you are young, hip and look good on the side of a building in a fucking designer jeans ad, you’re not going to get signed,’” she says in an interview conducted shortly before the film became the darling of the indie-film circuit.

While the Los Angeles club scene is the backdrop for the film, the theme is universal. “Do you stop because you haven’t made it?” asks Gershon. “I think anyone who is passionate about their art, their music, their acting … whatever it is, they don’t give up. That’s why I made this film.”

Prey for Rock and Roll is a condensed version of 20 years in the life of punk rocker Cheri Lovedog, who fronted her namesake band and played the Los Angeles circuit in the 1980s and early ’90s. Her band opened for X, Guns ’n’ Roses, Jane’s Addiction and other big-name rock bands, but their own music never caught on.

Ironically, now maybe it will.

Lovedog wrote some blazing tunes that Clamdandy plays in the film, most notably “My Favorite Sin,” “Ms. Tweak,” “Punk Rock Girl” and the title track, “Prey for Rock and Roll.”

Gershon does the vocals in the film and on the soundtrack, and is backed on the soundtrack by an all-star roster of female musicians, including Lovedog, Samantha Maloney (Hole), Sara Lee (Ani DiFranco) and Gina Volpe (Lunachicks). (Joan Jett originally consulted on the film and played lead guitar on the soundtrack, but was replaced because of a management dispute.)

After years of kicking around the same old Los Angeles clubs, Lovedog found herself in Jacki’s predicament — do you let the dream die or make a change? She decided to leave Los Angeles in 1995 and headed for Santa Cruz to be near her family, where she opened a tattoo parlor.

“I had a pretty crazy life down there,” says Lovedog, sounding very down-to-earth from her Northern California home. “People say the location won’t make a difference, but in my case, it did. I needed to get out of there.”

A psychic had told her to combine her music with writing, so she wrote a play about her punk rocker years in Hollywood — but only after neck surgery put her in a position in which she couldn’t do anything else.

Robin Whitehouse, a New York artistic director, came into Lovedog’s shop for a tattoo — and to make a long story short, Lovedog wound up playing the role of Jacki in Prey for Rock and Roll on a New York stage. She and Whitehouse then rewrote the piece into a feature film.

“It’s very autobiographical,” says Lovedog, who lives with her girlfriend of 11 years, Robin Prey, and their 6-year-old son, Sam. The film title is a “tribute” to Robin, who encouraged her to write.

Lovedog’s mother and other family members have seen the picture — in which they are accurately depicted, Lovedog insists.

“They are amazed,” she says. “They thought, ‘Oh my gosh, Gina really captured a lot of your personality.’”

Both Gershon and de Matteo play guitar — de Matteo was even set to perform in the stage version of Prey until she had a scheduling conflict with The Sopranos. But Petty and Cole took music lessons to pull off their rock-chick personas. “Learning to play the drums was the hardest creative thing I’ve ever done,” says Cole, who comes off as a confident baby-dyke drummer.

But other elements drew Cole to the part. The film delves into the day-to-day personal lives of the four women — and this makeshift family is no Brady Bunch. It helps explain why the music and the band are so important to these women and why they feel it’s all they have.

“My character is very much not a victim of her circumstances, and she very easily could be,” says Cole. “I’ve played so many bad girls, tortured souls. Those are all beautiful girls in their own right, but they’re all products of abuse and dysfunctional families, bad homes and runaways, whereas my character in this movie, Sally, has experienced a lot of the same things but doesn’t let it run and rule and kill her life. She decides not to be a victim, and that’s why her drums are her savior, and that’s why these women are her family.”

While Cole won’t say specifically how Sally’s life parallels her own, there are certain aspects to which she can relate. At one point, Sally tells Jacki, “When I’m playing, I feel …” And Jacki finishes her sentence: “Safe.”

“Jacki knows,” says Cole. “She’s experienced some of the same things and … to me in this movie, that’s my family. It just broke my heart when I read the script, because it was like, finally. It was so cathartic to play this character because it was really symbolic for me personally to be able to let go of some stuff in my personal life. And I know I could come out of my own tragedies and I don’t have to be a victim. Sally taught me a lot about that.

“Her saving grace was her drums. They gave her someplace to focus all that pain, all that energy, all that passion, whereas there are a lot of people who’ve been abused and had very traumatic experiences and don’t have something to dive into emotionally and creatively.”

Cole, who spent three years on WB’s Gilmore Girls, marked a couple of firsts in her role as the 23-year-old, Goth-inspired Sally. It’s her first feature film and her first on-screen kiss — which she shares with Lori Petty, the blond-haired, blue-eyed veteran of gutsy girl roles.

“I loved playing the scenes with her,” says Cole. “Lori was a very generous actor and she’s great. … She really helped me get through that and, you know, she was my girlfriend in the movie. And it was not hard at all to play her girlfriend. It was fun. We all had such a great time.”

Director Alex Steyermark, who has a film music background, insisted the actors look and act like a real band. So he had them rehearse like one, in addition to the usual amount of time they spent together on the set.

“We really got to know each other very well,” says Cole. “The vibes that you feel from us as characters in the movie are all very real.”

For Petty, the chance to play a Joan Jett-like rocker was cool, if not her style.

“I don’t listen to that type of music at all; I listen to jazz,” she says. “In real life, I live by the beach, I ride my bike, I live by myself with my kitty and I have a much more calm lifestyle than people might perceive.”

In Prey for Rock and Roll, the loyal, good-natured Faith doesn’t care if the band makes money. Music is her life. She would play for free. She’s happy being in the band, loving her girlfriend Sally and hanging out with friends. The last thing on her mind is what other people might think.

While Petty insists she’s nothing like Faith, they do appear to have certain things in common.

“Giving up on your dream, for me, would be giving up on expressing [my talents] — but you just can’t do that,” says Petty. “I don’t believe ‘making it’ means being on the cover of People magazine, and I don’t believe ‘making it’ means getting an Oscar.”

That explains why her agents might freak out over her eclectic movie choices — like this one, the lesbian punk rock chick who loves her guitar almost as much as she loves her girlfriend.

“They say all kinds of shit to me; I don’t listen to them,” she laughs. “I just don’t care that much about what they think is cool or what they think would be advantageous [to my career]. If that were the fact, I’d be wearing miniskirts and push-up bras and going to every premiere every night trying to get a job. That’s just not what I do.”

Instead, she’s surfed (Point Break), played baseball (A League of Their Own) and kicked ass (Tank Girl).

Petty has also played a lesbian before, in Relax … It’s Just Sex. “I had a beautiful girlfriend,” she says, referring to Cynda Williams. When it comes to sexuality, Petty seems less concerned about her image as an actress than she is about society’s penchant for labels.

“It’s like, yeah, I sleep with girls or yeah, I sleep with guys, whatever your sense of community is, it’s great; however you express your love is great. So I don’t know what the point is in getting upset over who somebody’s in love with.”

Prey for Rock and Roll deals with dark themes of drugs, death and violence, challenging but welcome work for the four lead actresses. Like the characters in the film, actresses face the same sort of age and sex discrimination.

“I purposely choose parts that aren’t just, like, the girl who asks the guy, ‘Why don’t you talk to me … where are you going?’” says Petty, mimicking the whiny female parts typically offered.

To counter that, Petty is writing her own screenplay. And, she paints. “I’m a painter and a writer and an athlete and an actor. I love to read and I love to play sports and so it’s just important for me to express all these gifts.”

Working with Petty and the other strong women in Prey for Rock and Roll was “really a thrill,” says Steyermark, who made his directing debut with the film. And even though he has an extensive movie music background (Original Kings of Comedy, I Know What You Did Last Summer, among others), he’s most happy with the non-musical scenes in Prey. He “completely gets” the music, says Lovedog, who originally wanted a female director. “He gets the women, too. So I said, yeah, he’s cool.”

“I loved working with Cheri,” Steyermark says. “Musically, she and I have some of the same influences. I was in a punk band in the ’80s. If Cheri lived in New York, we’d be hanging out.”

The irony isn’t lost on Lovedog that she may finally get the recognition she always craved. “I wrote a play about how I never made it in rock ’n’ roll, and now there’s a chance people are going to hear my music,” she says.

So maybe there’s something to that psychic?

Lovedog agrees: “She called it, man.”

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