How to Build a Girl | Little White Lies

How to Build a Girl

23 Jul 2020 / Released: 24 Jul 2020

Two young people, a man with short hair and a woman with long, curly red hair, smiling and looking at each other on a city street.
Two young people, a man with short hair and a woman with long, curly red hair, smiling and looking at each other on a city street.
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Anticipation.

Beanie Feldstein in Wolverhampton? Sure, why not.

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Enjoyment.

A fun if familiar coming-of-age tale.

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In Retrospect.

Runs out of steam, but Feldstein’s energy is infectious.

Beanie Feld­stein brings bags of charm to this deft adap­ta­tion of Caitlin Moran’s com­ing-of-age novel.

Beanie Feld­stein is the clos­est thing we have to a mod­ern day Mol­ly Ring­wald. She con­tin­ues a run which start­ed with a scene-steal­ing sup­port­ive role in Lady­bird and co-lead in the whip-smart Books­mart. Now Feld­stein has moved across the pond, trav­elled back to the ear­ly 90s, stuck on a frumpy school uni­form and adopt­ed a (some­times dodgy) Brum­mie accent in Coky Giedroyc’s How to Build a Girl.

Adapt­ed from a semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal best­seller by jour­nal­ist Caitlin Moran (who is also on screen­writ­ing duties), the film sees Feld­stein as Johan­na, a lone­ly 16-year-old girl who hasn’t quite fig­ured out who or what she wants to be yet. Grow­ing up in a cramped coun­cil house in Wolver­hamp­ton with four sib­lings, a pup­py farm, a past-his-sell-by-date rock drum­mer dad (Pad­dy Con­si­dine) and a mum strug­gling with post­na­tal depres­sion (Sarah Sole­mani), Johan­na is left to her own devices – which includes an over­ly zeal­ous imagination.

She chats to her wall of heroes (includ­ing Sylvia Plath, the Bron­tës and Jo March) and her best friend is Bian­ca, the bor­der col­lie. Burst­ing with cre­ativ­i­ty but with no out­let to speak of, Johan­na enters a jour­nal­ist com­pe­ti­tion for a Lon­don music mag­a­zine with a review of the Annie sound­track and some­how gets hired as the office pet.

The first half of How to Build a Girl, when Johan­na is falling in love with rock, run­ning after big city lights and fig­ur­ing out her sex­u­al­i­ty, is full of mag­i­cal moments. Giedroyc play­ful­ly makes posters come alive and they become Johanna’s con­fi­dants, a high­light being Bjork on a mag­a­zine cov­er telling her to get up and fight for space in the mag­a­zine because, room’s like that needs girls like you.” Fight­ing fire-with-fire in the hos­tile boys’ club office, Johan­na is told she needs to be tougher to get com­mis­sions and she rein­vents her­self as the red-haired, top-hat don­ning Dol­ly Wilde, pop’s gate­keep­er,” a crit­ic on a ram­page to destroy as many bands’ careers as she can get her hands on.

Feld­stein is clear­ly hav­ing the time of her life in the lead, get­ting to play both the film’s good­ie two shoes and the vil­lain in a per­for­mance rem­i­nis­cent of Emma Stone’s good-girl-goes-bad role in Easy A. It’s a shame, then, that the sec­ond half of How to Build a Girl los­es momen­tum before screech­ing to a stand-still with a con­clud­ing mono­logue that is, at best, mild­ly sweet and, at worst, utter­ly cringe-inducing.

Johan­na is emphat­ic that her sto­ry is not one defined by a boy, which is laud­able, but the film also strug­gles to flesh out any mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ships for its pro­tag­o­nist. A short scene between Johan­na and her mum in bed is per­fect­ly pitched, and it’s a shame their rela­tion­ship isn’t cov­ered in more depth. Yet despite nar­ra­tive flaws, it’s hard not to find Giedroyc’s film charm­ing — a bit like look­ing back at old school pho­tos of your­self. So, how do you build a girl then? By tri­al and error the film sug­gests, not unlike the film­mak­ing on dis­play here.

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