The life of a young teenager girl who is an artist and lives in San Francisco with her single mother, has been changed completely when she enters in an affair with the boyfriend of her mother, the thing that brings terrible for her, especially upon her mother's revealing the truth of their relationship.
"The Diary of a Teenage Girl" is a breakthrough moment in the culture in that it depicts youthful female sexuality ... not just with the unapologetic frankness the boys usually get, but with an awareness of all the places a girl's urges will take her ...
The Diary of A Teenage Girl moves in a sun-drenched haze, spattered with animation, thrilling in its very mundanity. It's smart and assured and, like Minnie, knows what it wants. Astonishing.
Writer/director Marielle Heller, in her captivating debut film "The Diary of a Teenage Girl," hits exactly the right tone for a complicated balancing act, and for a film that could very easily have gone wrong.
It's as sincere and honest as Minnie can be heartfelt and self-assertive. Bittersweetly raw about young-adult feelings and feeling so not-quite-adult. Joins Show Me Love and She Monkeys in the pantheon of superb female coming-of-age films.
"The Diary of a Teenage Girl" is as rewarding as it is squirm-inducing for its honesty, audacity and artful portrayal of adolescence from a girl's point of view.
Marielle Heller's adaption of Phoebe Gloeckner's excellent graphic novel captures that specific, lurching dynamic [of 1970s parenting] to the degree that those of us who lived through it might find ourselves dropping our jaws in recognition.
Powerful, exhausting, ecstatic, twisted and unerringly honest, "The Diary of a Teenage Girl" is a rare film indeed, a look at a young girl's messy coming of age told completely from the young girl's point of view.
