THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL
DIRECTOR: Marielle Heller
CAST: Bel Powley, Kristen Wiig, Alexander Skarsgard, Abby Wait
CLASSIFICATION: 18
RUNNING TIME: 101 minutes
RATING: 4 stars (out of 5)
Ann Hornaday
With The Diary of a Teenage Girl, filmmaker Heller and actress Powley deliver a sexual coming-of-age story frank enough to be discomfiting and disarming in equal measure.
Powley makes an impressive debut as Minnie, a 15-year-old living with her younger sister and mom in 1970s San Francisco. As the film opens, Minnie is striding across a city park, declaring in a voice-over that she’s just had sex for the first time. Within a few moments, the bravado and unfamiliar flush of desirability have given way to self-doubt, quickly squelched by the incipient flutterings of her own nascent power. Fear, exhilaration and ambivalence have rarely registered so palpably and in such rapid succession.
The story of how Minnie happened to have her first sexual experience, and the lengths she goes to in order to test the boundaries of her own hunger, ambition and curiosity, is the stuff of most parents’ nightmares. But one needn’t have first-person experience with, or even approve of, the extremes Minnie pursues to appreciate the forthright way Heller and Powley present a journey that is timeless and universal.
The Diary of a Teenage Girl is steeped in the drugs, music and freewheeling, pre-HIV hedonism of its time. Minnie’s mother, Charlotte (Wiig), runs a household of fuzzy boundaries, paying little attention to Minnie and her sister, Gretel (Wait), partying nights away with her friends and, at one point, suggesting to her boyfriend, Monroe (Skarsgard), that he take Minnie to a bar. It comes as no surprise that Minnie and Monroe start a relationship, which Heller depicts as understandable, if ill-advised. To the filmmaker’s credit, The Diary of a Teenage Girl goes where Lolita, Smooth Talk, Thirteen and An Education have gone before and claims it as new territory. Here, the adolescent protagonist isn’t the projection of lecherous fantasies, moral-panic anxieties or wistful nostalgia, but a full-blooded human, her sense of agency fully operational, even when it’s powered more by confusion than a clear sense of purpose.
Is Minnie in love with Monroe? Does having sex mean she’s finally an adult? At what point do the feminist tenets of sexual liberation take on the sobering, slightly icky contours of exploitation and self-loathing? Heller deftly threads the audience and her heroine through these questions and more, as Minnie not only begins to define herself as a physical being, but also as an artist.
The Diary of a Teenage Girl is based on an illustrated novel by Phoebe Gloeckner, and Heller suffuses her movie with beautifully rendered drawings and animations illustrating Minnie’s often distorted internal monologue. Tellingly, when she’s feeling most empowered by her newfound avidity and unruly appetites, she imagines herself as an Amazon, bestriding San Francisco like a monster of her own most audacious yet still tentative making.
With her Bettie Page bangs and watchful stare, Powley makes a transfixing Minnie, who ricochets from moon-faced naivete to wry knowingness at the blink of an eye. Wiig is just as assured as the somewhat ditzy Charlotte, who can’t perceive alarm bells even when they’re clanging right under her coked-up nose. Skarsgard’s Monroe, a 35-year-old man-child, isn’t so much the villain of this piece as one more misguided seeker whom Heller treats with more amused compassion than disdain. When Minnie and her best friend, Kimmie (Madeleine Waters), begin flirting with their own increasingly perilous dark sides, his interest in Minnie begins to feel almost reassuring in comparison.
The Diary of a Teenage Girl does get dark, and it becomes painful to watch Minnie continually try to replace the gaze and touch of a distracted, sneakily competitive mother with the embrace of those who are clearly unworthy of her. Heller adroitly heightens that central psychological drama, even when it’s kept largely off screen while Minnie plunges into her next misadventure.
Whatever that escapade is, it will end up as fodder for her tape-recorded journal, or maybe her confessional drawings.
While Minnie’s trying to find her voice as an artist or control her body as a woman, she’s also trying to ascertain where that crucial, invisible membrane is between her and the rest of the world – whether it should be tough or vulnerable, thick or thin. By the film’s triumphant final scene, it’s clear she’ll be able to figure it out. To paraphrase Minnie after a particularly pivotal chapter of her sentimental education: It’s still just skin. – Washington Post
If you liked Mistress America or Tangerine, you will like this.