NEW YORK – You’re about to see a lot of “Dawson’s Creek” darling Michael Pitt. So much so that his new film, “The Dreamers,” earned an NC-17 rating due to its nudity and sex.

But though he has gone from TV heartthrob to Brooklyn’s movie-sex poster boy, the 22-year-old former panhandler is not exactly living a celluloid dream.

“I don’t have a boiler in my apartment and it’s been cold this winter,” confesses Pitt, who has been sick for weeks.

Sniffling in a booth in Flatbush Avenue’s cheesecake mecca Junior’s, just up the street from where he lives, Pitt grins before wiping Russian salad dressing off his lip with his thumb. “I have a space heater that I use in my room when I sleep and when I wake up I have to run with it to heat up the bathroom.

“I’ve done the winter without heat when I first came to New York,” he says, referring to days of bumming change in Times Square after he ran away from his home in West Orange, N.J., at age 16.

“Now it’s like, I’m making some money. I should have some heat. Um, right?”

“The Dreamers,” directed by Italian maestro Bernardo Bertolucci (“Last Tango in Paris”), will leave audiences hot and bothered – or hot under the collar. It’s the first NC-17 movie released in more than six years.

“In America, (doing full nude scenes) can be a risky thing, looked upon as not work but just something obscene,” says Pitt, who bares the full monty and performs skin-timate acts as an American seduced by two siblings during the 1968 Paris riots.

“You can stick a gun down a guy’s throat and blow his head off and get an R rating, but you can’t show sex.

“I think it’s basically the insecurity of the guys at the studio, a bunch of old men who feel uncomfortable if they see” a young guy without clothes.

That doesn’t mean Pitt (no relation to Brad) found stripping down for his role a breeze while on location in Paris.

“I was the big prude,” says Pitt with an embarrassed grin, speaking in his slow murmur. “I’m not going to pretend that I don’t get insecure.

“Before our first nude scene, (French co-star) Louis (Garrel) stripped naked and ran through every room screaming. It loosened everybody up.

“Pretty much the only person who was left uncomfortable was me.”

Considering what Pitt has lived through, it’s a surprise that anything fazes him.

A troubled childhood led to therapy at age 9 and special ed classes early on.

“I got all of those labels: dyslexia, perceptually impaired, all of the good excuses,” Pitt recalls.

Disgust creeps into his voice as he remembers the big public schools where “no one knows your name and the teachers don’t care and you don’t really have to go if you don’t want to.”

Pitt was kicked out of three high schools and had the drug Special K pumped from his stomach at 15.

He fled to New York a year later.

“I think I had a fourth-grade reading level when I left high school,” says Pitt, who claims he still “is no Einstein.”

He can’t use a computer and uses phonetic spelling when he writes.

He memorizes lines before auditions because he can’t spontaneously read them off a page.

“It would come off that I was more prepared and smarter than my peers, but really it was just me scared they were going to ask me to read something,” he says.

Rudy Giuliani’s quality-of-life campaign hit Pitt hard and there are some warrants out for his arrest.

“I got caught for a bunch of different things that I’m not going to talk about,” he says. “It was not a good time to be one of those kids on the street.”

His performance in an Off-Broadway play caught the attention of WB network scouts. Though they tried to tempt him with a three-year role as Henry Parker on “Dawson’s Creek,” Pitt settled for a 15-episode run instead. “I just needed some money and some exposure and to get off (the show) as soon as possible,” he says.

“At the time I would much rather have done theater and not make as much money and be happy.” He’s happy to stay relatively underground, as an arthouse “It” boy with roles in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “Bully.”

His upcoming movies include a prison drama, “Jailbait,” and the stop-animation-laden film “Rhinocerous Eyes.”

Pitt’s serious rock band Pagoda rehearses in his home studio, which is soundproofed with old rugs.

“I guess with me being an actor we could get some big company to fund us,” says Pitt, who sings and taught himself to play guitar.

“But I feel it would be less important as opposed to hiring my friends and figuring out a way to put it together ourselves.”