Mandy Moore 2.0

WHEN Mandy Moore steps out of her black Prius and bounds into a tiny speck of a restaurant in Los Feliz, not a hipster on the block flinches. Sure, her toffee bangs are partially covering her eyes -- but you’d expect someone might make a correlation between the girl on the street and the enormous photo of her plastered on a giant billboard just a few yards away, towering over Vermont Avenue.

But clad in her flowy indigo Mayle dress and little yellow sweater, the truth is that Moore, now 23, scarcely resembles her former self. In 1999, she was a shell of a 15-year-old with wisps of honeycomb hair strategically placed over her face, timidly staring out from the cover of her first album, “So Real.”

That was the Mandy Moore who hit the pop charts with “Candy,” the catchy but empty single that branded her as just another sugary tween act. The same Moore who, in her other career as an actress, has appeared in a string of clean, “aw, shucks!” movie roles.

“I find it funny that people are like, ‘Wow, this is such a departure for you,’ ” she says, curling into a red banquette at her dinner selection, Cafe Figaro, and discussing her fifth album, “Wild Hope,” the first for which she’s written the songs herself. “For someone to question the authenticity of where this record comes from is kind of mind-boggling to me. I am 23 years old. I think it should be acceptable that nine years after my first record I’m doing something else musically.”

The album isn’t as squeaky clean as her youthful following might expect: “I’m the one who likes to make love on the floor,” she sings in “Gardenia,” raising the question: Will audiences accept a grown-up Mandy Moore?

“She’s certainly weathered all sorts of idiotic criticism about being too wholesome or bubble-gum,” says Ken Kwapis, director of “License to Wed,” which also casts Moore in a more mature light. The romantic comedy, due July 3, costars Robin Williams and “The Office’s” John Krasinski. In “Dedication,” hailed at Sundance and arriving in theaters later this summer, Moore plays opposite Billy Crudup.

“She’s finding herself in public in a graceful way,” Kwapis adds.

When she lets you in, Moore reminds you of your best friend’s cool older sister. The one you’re actually hoping to hang out with; the one who sneaks in during your sleepovers to explain the intricacies of French kissing. She’s consistently reassuring and scarily kind, to the point where you question why exactly she’s being so nice to her younger sister’s dorky best friend.

Moore seems to view herself the same way, as a curious nerd -- dismissing anyone’s interest in her as unwarranted. Instead, she focuses her attention on a list of the dozens of things she is “ob-sess-ed” with: salmon (“I ate it for all three meals the other day”); hanging at Hollywood’s divey Hotel Cafe and the peculiar phrase “Man alive!”

One fascination recently has taken top billing among her obsessions: A 1920s house veiled by the Catskill Mountains where she spent two months last fall recording “Wild Hope.”

“I’d get up, drive my rent-a-car down to Woodstock to drink coffee and read the paper alone at this cafe,” the New Hampshire-born, Orlando, Fla.-reared singer gushes, the pace of her speech accelerating. “Then I’d take these secluded drives in the mountains. It was ideal.”

And why not? Last autumn marked the first time Moore could assume the musical control she’d relinquished going back to “Candy.”

“She was definitely No. 4 in the pop world. It was Britney, Christina, Jessica and then little Mandy,” says Jon Leshay, who has managed Moore since she was 14. “She was the one who didn’t know how to walk in heels and wasn’t going to wear a rhinestone bustier.”

Moore shakes her head just at the mention of those days. Told that “Candy” wasn’t half bad -- a song that spent 20 weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100 -- she grimaces.

“In my heart of hearts, I do feel bad about that time,” she says, cutting into a delicate platter of sauteed scallops over legumes. “But who was I to tell a record label at 15 years old, like, ‘I don’t think this is the best direction for me?’ ”

As she grew older, Moore found it more difficult to keep mum when she was offered uninspiring tunes. Her label, Epic Records, begrudgingly obliged her whims and released her third album “Coverage” in 2003, in which she recorded favorite songs from the ‘70s by acts such as Elton John and Carole King.

After scant promotion for the album, however, Moore moved from Epic to Warner Bros./Sire, where she immediately made it known she was interested in songwriting. But when she suggested the quirky co-writers she’d discovered on iTunes -- among them indie girl Rachael Yamagata and folk duo the Weepies -- things began to go awry.

“They were pitching the songwriters du jour,” she says. “Not other artists, but professional songwriters who made me feel like it was an obligation for them to sit down with me.”

So when Leshay suggested Moore jump on the bandwagon of a new venture between his entertainment talent management company, the Firm, and EMI Records, she and Warners parted amicably. The new deal allows Moore to split all revenue 50-50, simultaneously giving her that coveted creative freedom.

“Each time we wrote, I’d be blown away by how honest and ballsy she was,” says country musician Lori McKenna, who co-wrote three songs with her.

“Wild Hope,” which she’ll spotlight when she plays the Roxy on Tuesday, is her bid to join the earthy-crunchy singer-songwriters she admires, and it carries the feeling of someone coming to grips with her past. Her more organic-sounding pop tunes are fueled by lyrics Moore scribbled into her Moleskine journal, stories that allow listeners to see the world through her rose-tinted glasses and beyond, past what appears to have been a severely broken heart.

“I hope that people give her a fair shake because where she’s at now is a very rich place,” says Steve Tannen, half of the Weepies, another of her co-writers.

“Maybe this record will sort of shift people’s perception of me,” Moore says, biting her lip cautiously. “Or at least the effort will be applauded. But I don’t even expect that from people. I’m just happy and proud at the end of the day. And I guess that’s all you can be, right? That’s all you can hope for.”

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amy.kaufman@latimes.com

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Mandy Moore

Where: Roxy Theatre, 9009 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday

Price: $19

Contact: (310) 276-2222