The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015)
Coming-of-age cinema has always had a complicated relationship with discomfort. The genre works best when it refuses to sand down the rougher edges of adolescence, and Marielle Heller's debut feature, adapted from Phoebe Gloeckner's semi-autobiographical 2002 graphic novel of the same name, is very much in that tradition. Gloeckner's source material was itself a frank, at times provocative account of growing up female in 1970s San Francisco, blending prose with illustration to capture the texture of a particular time and place. It was not an easy book to love, and Heller, to her credit, does not attempt to make an easy film from it. The setting is San Francisco, 1976, a city still shaking out the ideological confetti of the counter-culture era, where free-spirited attitudes towards sex, drugs, and parental responsibility have calcified into something rather more neglectful. It is the kind of milieu that films like mid90s have also used to good effect, grounding personal stories of youth and identity in a period atmosphere that feels specific rather than merely decorative.
Heller had worked extensively in theatre before stepping behind the camera here, and that background shows in the intimate, character-driven approach she brings to the material. Produced on a modest independent budget across a consortium of smaller outfits including Archer Gray and Cold Iron Pictures, the film punches well above its financial weight in terms of production design and period authenticity. The animated sequences, drawn in the style of Gloeckner's own illustration work, are woven into the live action with a lightness of touch that stops the device feeling gimmicky. They serve a real purpose, externalising Minnie's inner life in a way that straightforward voiceover alone could not manage. Heller would go on to direct titles of growing prestige, but this remains the work that announced her as a filmmaker with a genuinely distinct sensibility.
At the centre of it all is Bel Powley, a British actress who had done solid if unspectacular work before this, largely on television. Here she is given an enormous amount to carry, barely off screen for the entire runtime, and she shoulders it with a physicality and emotional openness that feels entirely unguarded. Kristen Wiig plays her mother Charlotte, a woman who is convincingly drawn as someone too absorbed in her own pleasures and disappointments to notice what is happening under her own roof. Wiig brings a quality of distracted warmth that stops the character tipping into straightforward villainy, which is the right call. Alexander Skarsgård, playing Monroe, has built a career on a certain brooding, surface-level charm, and that quality is precisely what the role asks of him. Christopher Meloni rounds out the family picture as a stepfather figure who remains largely peripheral to the central drama. For a comparable study of how adult appetites and adolescent vulnerability intersect in a period setting, Macca's thoughts on The Perks of Being a Wallflower make for an interesting parallel read, as does his review of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, another film that circles questions of desire, agency, and moral ambiguity without arriving at tidy answers.
There is something undeniably arresting about watching a teenager narrate her own messy, chaotic awakening into a clunky 1970s dictaphone while sketching comic books.
Marielle Heller’s 2015 picture The Diary of a Teenage Girl drops us straight into the headspace of Minnie Goetze, a young woman feeling profoundly unloved in the wake of her parents' bitter split. She is surrounded by her mother’s revolving door of boyfriends, seeking refuge in her artwork and a frankly excellent period soundtrack.
For the first twenty minutes, I was distracted by a nagging, annoying feeling that I’d seen lead actress Bel Powley somewhere before (and it was Ashes in the Snow, a vastly different Lithuanian war drama) but fair play to her, she quickly shakes off that distraction with a fiercely committed, raw performance.
However, the film takes a deeply uncomfortable turn that left me with a distinctly sour taste in my mouth. Minnie enters into a secret, highly inappropriate relationship with her mother’s much older boyfriend, Monroe, played by Alexander Skarsgård. While the narrative is clearly meant to be a messy examination of teenage sexuality, sex, drugs, and inevitable mistakes, Heller’s direction occasionally feels like it’s trying to normalise this predatory dynamic. What makes it a genuinely hard watch is the glaring lack of repercussions for Monroe. He essentially skates away with nothing more than his own self-inflicted addictions, while the film conveniently glosses over the profound power imbalance at play. It is a bold choice, sure, but it completely undermines the emotional truth of the scenario.
The structural frustrations don't stop there, either. The narrative is so hyper-focused on Minnie’s turbulent romance that it completely neglects the rest of its ensemble. Her little sister is woefully under-explored, reduced to little more than a background prop in the family’s domestic chaos. Then we reach the finale, which is frankly a bit of an anti-climax. After all that heavy, emotionally taxing drama, the picture essentially dusts its hands, shrugs, and decides to just go back to comic book drawing. It is an unsatisfying, abrupt conclusion that robs the preceding two hours of any real narrative payoff or meaningful resolution.
The Diary of a Teenage Girl is a picture that swings for the fences with its unflinching look at adolescent confusion, but it frequently trips over its own moral ambiguity. Heller has crafted a visually distinct, sonically brilliant time capsule of 1970s San Francisco, and Powley is an absolute revelation in the lead. Yet, the film's refusal to properly interrogate its most toxic relationship, combined with a frustratingly limp ending, keeps it from achieving true greatness. It is a fascinating, if flawed, coming-of-age story.
The Diary of a Teenage Girl sits in an awkward but honest category of films, the kind that are clearly made with artistic sincerity and genuine craft, but whose central choices leave a residue of unease that does not fully resolve by the time the credits roll. Powley's performance alone earns it a place in any serious conversation about coming-of-age cinema, and Heller's eye for the period is polished but unremarkable in the best possible sense, present without ever becoming a distraction. Whether the film's moral looseness reads as bravery or evasion likely depends on where you sit when the lights go up. What is not really in question is that it commits, fully and without apology, to its own vision of a young woman finding her voice in a world that is not particularly listening. The trouble is, by the end, you half wonder if the film itself was paying attention.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2015 | Watched: 2026-08-09
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) on YouTube
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