In the long, inglorious catalog of cheap tricks used by filmmakers to signify a character’s colorful inner life—and by proxy denote their movie as equally creative—having the protagonist carry on conversations with imaginary figures is near the bottom. But to be fair, director Coky Giedroyc’s “How to Build a Girl” had numerous strikes against it without even considering the protagonist’s bedroom wall covered in pictures of her heroes, who come to life just long enough for you to say, “Hey, is that Michael Sheen playing Sigmund Freud? And why?”
The film follows a girl, Johanna (an effervescent Beanie Feldstein), who talks to icons like Freud or Sylvia Plath (Lucy Punch) for the same reason most things happen in misunderstood teen movies—she has no friends. Compounding her sense of isolation is the feeling of being trapped by circumstances of geography (a bleakly grey council flat marooned somewhere in the wastes of Wolverhampton) and birth (a chronically poor and borderline depressive family). The very schematic arc plotted by Caitlin Moran’s bestselling YA novel (she also adapted the screenplay) has the bookish, bespectacled but volcanically energetic Johanna bursting out of her high school shell by snagging a job at a London music tabloid through pluck and luck. After shocking the staff with her youth in an “Almost Famous” gender twist, Johanna sets off to become a rock journalist.
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. The sense of freedom and glee practically vibrates off the screen, due mostly to Feldstein’s impossibly zippy, firecracker energy and no-holds-barred zest for raucous yet perfectly timed Belushi-esque physical comedy. If for no other reason than seeing Johanna finally get out into the world beats the earlier scenes’ flat and unfunny running voiceover, during these scenes the movie briefly takes on the sense of adolescent adventure it elsewhere fails to locate.
Even though “How to Build a Girl” is centered on music as an avenue for expression and discovery, there is precious little music that makes much of an impression. This is partly due to the story being set in the 1990s, shown here correctly as a time when British music journalists used gallons of ink to extol or excoriate the likes of Happy Mondays and Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine. But it is also because Johanna is more writer than music lover (her lack of cool is signified early on by her love of the “Annie” soundtrack). She is word-struck, a fountain of giddy verbiage that at times threatens to carry the whole movie away with it. Her soliloquy on the newly discovered joys of sex (delivered to her mortified brother) has the nerdy raunch of a Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg scene with the added level of ribaldry a teenage girl would still be unlikely to deliver in an American movie.
But despite Feldstein’s best efforts to bear-hug the movie, that feeling of true escape never quite happens. The story is hampered by familiarity. Johanna’s rise to pop infamy and then her inevitable crash back to morality is sketched out in such rote fashion that she seems to transform from shy wallflower to gutsy scene-maker almost instantaneously. Some color is sketched in the background by her family, particularly her dreaming-of-fame father (played by Paddy Considine with a particularly guileless brand of cool), but they are shuffled off to the side when not required to either be impressed or annoyed by Johann’s new-found success. A subplot about her crush on a pop star (Alfie Allen) she’s meant to profile would have been more effective if it did not also feel cropped from “Almost Famous.”
Clumsy and erratic, though possessed of an undeniable bounding and puppy-like energy, “How to Build a Girl” is a star vehicle for Feldstein that, while it often does not do its star justice, also knows when to just stay out of her way. [C+]