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‘The Diary of a Teenage Girl’ is a sad, funny, and honest coming-of-age story

Moviegoers have had more than their fare share of cinematic bildungsromans to choose from in recent years. Even for those who found last year’s Boyhood to be too focused on the male experience of growing up, Blue is the Warmest Color, released the previous year, provided a more than suitable alternative. Outside of the realist lens, Pixar’s Inside Out gave a powerful and humorous glimpse inside the mind of an eleven-year girl as she coped with a move and struggled with the anxieties of adolescence. But despite this plethora of films on more or less the same subject, none of them them have quite attacked it in the same manner as The Diary of a Teenage Girl, the debut of writer/director Marielle Heller (adapted from the autobiographical novel of the same name by Phoebe Gloeckner).

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