But the roles, she found, were not as memorable as her sexy squeak. “After ‘Chasing Amy,’ I thought, ‘Oh, I’m finally gonna get to do good parts,’” Adams says. “But they’re not out there. I was really disillusioned.” Tired of sitting around waiting, she decided to write and direct her own movie. “Come Early Morning,” a semiautobiographical film starring Ashley Judd, took Adams five years to make but premiered at this year’s Sundance to good notices.

But her off-screen life has a parallel with her new film: She has had a sort-of breakup with Vince Vaughn. The two met over a decade ago in Hollywood.

“I thought he was really cute, and we ended up talking, and he asked me out,” she recalls. The next day she invited Vaughn to a dog park with her friend, even though no one actually had a dog. “Vince thought that was really strange … and I completely freaked him out by bringing a friend along.”

Adams remembers Vaughn telling her that day about a new script a friend had written, and how one character was based on him. “Vince was really shy,” she says. “I thought, ‘Why would someone base a character on you?’” The friend was Jon Favreau, and the movie was the indie cult classic “Swingers.” And despite her and Vaughn’s awkward “date,” a friendship flourished; she became part of his creative circle, which includes Favreau, “Arrested Development” star Jason Bateman and “Break-Up” producer Peter Billingsley.