Mark Reviews Movies: HOW TO BUILD A GIRL

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 7, 2020

Coming-of-age stories, obviously, are about growth by way of experience, learning from one's successes and failures, discovering people and ideas and place beyond one's immediate background, and getting ever so closer to a set identity. The protagonist of How to Build a Girl goes through all of that in a very short amount of time, but even then, it isn't fast enough. You just want her to grow the hell up, already.

She's Johanna Morrigan (Beanie Feldstein), a shy and awkward teenage girl who's regularly mocked and harassed by her classmates. Growing up in relative poverty (The family has a nice house, but Johanna only has half a bedroom, where photos of cultural icons talk to her—making her seem more mentally unbalanced than endearingly quirky), she wants to make something of her life.

Writing is her strongest talent, so Johanna enters a competition for an internship at a music magazine. The staff laughs at her at first, but she pleads for a story assignment. With her discovery of rock-and-roll, Johanna takes on a new identity: the bold Dolly Wilde, who quickly becomes a famous music critic. In the process, Johanna sees a lot more of life and the world, but she also turns into someone who's far from admirable.

That in itself isn't a problem, as long as it comes from a place honesty. The movie, directed by Coky Giedroyc and written by Caitlin Moran (based on her novel), is supposedly based on a "true-ish" story, although neither its generalities nor its specifics possess any semblance of reality (Ignore how popular and famous she becomes from a handful of concert reviews, and just note how she financially rescues her family with the pay for those assignments). The story shifts purpose and focus almost as frequently as Johanna changes the fundamentals of her personality, which is saying something.

We get glimpses of Johanna at school and at home before her revelation/transformation, but the character in this phase only exists to manipulate us into feeling sympathy for her (The other kids joke about her being poor, and she regularly makes a fool of herself, especially when trying to be cool). Everything from then on is rushed, meaning that we never have an understanding of Johanna as a person beyond the most basic of traits.

Giedroyc tries to compensate with some stylistic flourishes (those talking photos—of people like Sigmund Freud and Cleopatra and, in case the tone deafness isn't clear by that point, a suicide-joke-making Sylvia Plath—and a montage set to a show tune), but it always comes across as trying too hard to make up for the hollow shell of the main character. There are a few moments of sincerity here, such as Johanna's first concert, where she feels a kind of freedom she has never felt before, or her day-long interview/chat with rock star John Kite (Alfie Allen). He likes her enthusiasm, shares his personal demons, and comes to regret it.

In the end, though, John, who is personally betrayed by someone much younger and objectively much less interesting than him, still thinks the two of them will become more later in life. That's because, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, the one thing that's always insisted by Moran's screenplay is that Johanna is just great—funny when she's sad, witty when she's mean, regretful when she's unnecessarily cruel to the people she loves. Indeed, the character changes so much and behaves in such sometimes appalling ways that we actually might start to think those talking photos aren't just a miscalculated gag about how imaginative Johanna is.

The whole point, of course, is that Johanna is on the course to discovering herself. Every step along the way, though, is different but equally insufferable. She goes from woeful moper, to naïve adorer, to the cold-hearted holder of a poison pen, and right back to the start. For as much whiplash as the movie's tonal and narrative modifications may offer, Johanna herself is less a character than a figure whose very essence is randomized every 20 minutes or so.

Basically, Johanna feels phony, as a character and in just how unbelievably convenient her story is. That's the last impression one should get from a story that's ostensibly about the truth of a person. As it theoretically should, How to Build a Girl mirrors its protagonist, although that's a big mistake here. The movie does as much insincere posing as the character.

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