How To Build A Girl
IFCThe music-oriented, British period piece trend is now in full swing. How to Build a Girl, much like last year’s Blinded by the Light, depicts a downtrodden individual attempting to escape their small town and succeed in the journalism industry. Whereas the aforementioned Bruce Springsteen love affair portrays a Luton-based British-Pakistani, Coky Giedroyc’s latest feature, based on Caitlin Moran’s semi-autobiographical novel from 2014, revolves around a precocious teenager hailing from Wolverhampton.
Johanna Morrigan (Beanie Feldstein) is the protagonist here, a smart, yet lonely 16-year-old, who spends evenings in libraries and hands in thirty-three page essays for her assignments. After winning a local poetry competition, an appearance on national television seems like the perfect opportunity to improve her self-confidence. Stage-fright unfortunately ruins the moment, whilst also implicating her father, Pat (Paddy Considine), in a fraudulent claims investigation. The family struggles financially, and brother Krissi (Laurie Kynaston) prompts Johanna to apply for a role at D&ME, a London-based rock magazine.
True to her naive nature, she submits a review of the Annie soundtrack, with the staff initially believing her application to be a prank from a rival paper. After initial bemusement at the situation, she demands to be taken seriously, and is assigned a Manic Street Preachers concert in Birmingham. Realising she won’t fit in, Johanna goes for an exaggerated look , donning a top hat and red wig, changing her pen name to Dolly Wilde in the process. With the updated look comes a new attitude, trading youthful innocence for unadulterated crassness, while her early light-hearted reviews are soon replaced by scathing character assassinations.
Fresh from starring roles in Lady Bird and Booksmart, Feldstein, at least on paper, seems like a perfect fit for the role of an energetic youth, but the Black Country accent proves too big an obstacle for the actress to overcome. Sounding far closer to East London than West Midlands, Feldstein’s performance is unfortunately defined by this misguided attempt, likely to join the pantheon of disastrous English accents, alongside Dick Van Dyke (Mary Poppins) and Don Cheadle (The Ocean’s Trilogy). Whilst the aforementioned pair are somewhat saved by the tongue-in-cheek tone and their supporting roles, Johanna is the absolute centrepiece here, meaning no respite can be found.
To make matters worse, the character herself is largely unlikeable, with her alter ego feeling like a trite attempt at being quirky. The subsequent narrative beats, in which familial conflicts arise, feel uninspired, whilst the treatment of mental health is ludicrously tone-deaf, rendering potentially emotional scenes as complete non-events. The commentary on sexism in the workplace is similarly tepid, never tackling misogyny head-on until it is convenient for Johanna to do so. The only remotely nuanced narrative strand is about Krissi’s homosexuality, which is normalised to a point where it is essentially a non-issue, but he, like Pat and popstar John Kite – a charming yet criminally underused Alfie Allen – remain undeveloped.
The stylistic elements, such as characters and historical figures coming to life on Johanna’s wall, also disappoint, feeling like nothing more than a vessel for standard coming-of-age monologues . With figures like Maria Von Trapp, Sigmund Freud and Jo March chiming in occasionally, Johanna’s interests are never properly explored, resulting in a gimmick that feels phony. In essence, this is the crux of the problem with How to Build a Girl: the film fails to cover even the most tiresome narrative beats with any conviction. Whether it be Feldstein’s accent, the bland visuals or the most uninspired choices in music, this is a flop in every sense of the word. It fails to make the most of a likeable cast and a region of England that is largely untouched in cinema. Ironically, lessons can be learned from the title; build up from stable foundations, and you might end up with something worthwhile.