Screening Room: ‘How to Build a Girl’

Caitlin Moran’s popular YA novel How to Build a Girl was about a geeky girl from the Midlands who takes a sharp left-turn into hipsterdom when she reinvents herself as a snarky music journalist in the 1990s. (You know, when Happy Mondays were a thing.)

The movie adaptation of How to Build a Girl, starring Booksmart‘s irrepressible Beanie Feldstein, opens this week. My review is at The Playlist:

At first, the gig is all champagne and caviar, despite the eye-rolling putdowns delivered by her editors, a posh band of professional haters who have a hard time taking a girl from the Midlands seriously. After giving herself a makeover (a sequence unimaginatively set to Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl”), Johanna charges into nightclubs sporting fire-engine-red hair, a top hat, and the nom de plume Dolly Wilde, wielding her pen and notebook with more moxie than Lester Bangs…

Here’s the trailer: