Female coming-of-age story feels fresh
Print Edition
IN “Diary of a Teenage Girl,” a bell-bottomed California 15-year-old girl comes of age in 1970s San Francisco. She documents the transition she’s been craving, narrating into a tape recorder her eager plunge into sex and adulthood, and illustrating it in crude cartoons that take after R. Crumb.
The awakening of Minnie Goetze (23-year-old Bel Powley) is awkward and brash, enthusiastic and angst-ridden, lewd and tender. And it’s honest.
As a film made by women and starring a female protagonist, “Diary of a Teenage Girl” is a fresh entry in a coming-of-age tradition that has, in the movies, almost always been seen through male eyes. It’s an unusually accomplished first film from Marielle Heller, who also wrote the screenplay, an adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner’s 2002 graphic novel.
The different perspective is clear from the first shot, in which Heller, in close-up, trails from behind and below the hippy strut of Minnie. She narrates: “I had sex today. Holy s---.” Minnie smiles to herself, but her glow momentarily fades when a buxom blonde jogs past.
Such fleeting, contrary emotions of exuberance and self-doubt pinball throughout “Diary of a Teenage Girl,” a movie with a firm grip on how it feels to be a precocious 15-year-old in burning pursuit of self-discovery.
She finds much of it within her family’s San Francisco apartment, where she lives with her mom, Charlotte (Kristen Wiig), and little sister, Gretal (Abby Wait).
The air is filled with cigarette smoke, sunlight and the moral muddiness of post-60s, Patty Hearst-era 1976.
Female sexuality has typically been so constrained by the movies that “Diary of a Teenage Girl” feels almost radical in its portrait of empowering promiscuity.
Heller occasionally overlays the film with bits of psychedelic animations by Sara Gunnarsdottir, a technique that is a little overused. Minnie aspires to become a cartoonist like Aline Kominsky, R. Crumb’s future wife.
But thank goodness the irreverent but earnest “Diary of a Teenage Girl” avoids the moralizing that would usually accompany a film about young people, sex and drugs.
Besides, Minnie is too busy growing up to get bogged down in such things, too busy haplessly becoming one of the most memorable protagonists of the year.
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