On screen, in the Swed ish thriller “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” Noomi Rapace looks like someone you’d run into on St. Marks Place. Anorexically thin and sullen, with spiky jet-black hair, prominent tattoos (one of a giant dragon) and many facial piercings.

In person, as I discovered when I talked with Rapace in New York recently, she looks more like a stylish, well-dressed woman you might see on Fifth Avenue.

“The piercings were real, the tattoos were not,” Rapace says. In any event, all are now gone.

Rapace plays Lisbeth, an ass-kicking, punk-Goth computer hacker who hooks up with a middle-aged journalist who has been hired by an industrialist to learn what happened to his great-niece. She vanished 40 years earlier at her wealthy family’s island retreat.

The film is based on the first novel of Stieg Larsson’s international best-selling “Millennium” trilogy.

Larsson wrote that Lisbeth looks as if “she had emerged from a weeklong orgy with a gang of hard rockers.”

Thirty-year-old Rapace — who confesses that she’s “interested in the darker side of humanity” — changed her entire persona to fit the bill. She even took up kick-boxing and learned to ride a motorcycle.

The transformation, says the film’s director, Niels Arden Oplev, was “chillingly perfect.”

* There’s good news and bad news on the Asian front.

The bad news: Park Chan-wook’s brilliant thriller “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” (2002) is going to be remade in Hollywood by the people who gave us the disasters “GI Joe” and “Transformers 2: Rise of the Fallen.” (I’m beginning to feel sick.)

And now the good: The South Korean original unreels Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Tribeca Cinemas, Varick and Canal streets. Admission is free, on a first-come, first-served basis. Doors open at 6:30.

Grady Hendrix of Subway Cinema, who has a way with words, says that “by the time you stumble out of the theater, each frame [of the original] will be seared into your brain.”

V.A. Musetto is film editor of The Post; vam@nypost.com