Watching The Diary of a Teenage Girl is like being hugged by a Lisa Frank panda while floating on a sea of Hitachi Magic Wands and cotton candy. It’s like diving into a clawfoot tub of LUSH products while wearing a snorkel full of root beer. Its color palate is Indica-laced rainbow sherbet. Its heart is a sentient mug of hot cocoa. Its eyes are Bel Powley’s cartoonishly gigantic, wide-open baby blues.
It’s also about statutory rape, and that juxtaposition’s caused no shortage of controversy for Marielle Heller’s directorial debut. That’s too bad, because at its core, Teenage Girl is about a 15-year-old coming into her own as an artist (it’s based on the autobiographical work of real-life cartoonist Phoebe Gloeckner), a storyline I wish more people cared about enough to write into movies.