Alexander Skarsgard Explains The Drag Thing

“Diary” is a vivid and sometimes surprising story of rising up feminine in 1976 San Francisco, advised with tenderness and humor by first-time director Marielle Heller and starring a blue-eyed lightning bolt of an actress named Bel Powley as Minnie. Minnie, an aspiring artist, is 15. Her lover is her mum’s boyfriend Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård), who is handsome, charming and a layabout.

I had conflicting reactions. Can I dress in drag as well? As a onetime teenage girl, I recognized the messy, inappropriate, envelope-pushing, boundary-crossing truths of adolescent sexuality. “It took about four hours to get dolled up”.

The different perspective is clear from the first shot, in which Heller, in close-up, trails from behind and below the hippy strut of Minnie.

The classic gender-swapped May-December romance was one of the films that Heller looked at for inspiration on the look and feel of ‘Diary.’ The themes, time period and setting of the film were an important parallel. Her previous stepfather, we learn, had instilled fear in her mother over Minnie’s developing sexuality; as a result, her mother had stopped touching her. Minnie says to her diary, “My mother doesn’t touch me if she can avoid it. She used to touch me a lot when I was little”.

“It was a friend’s daughter who was older than me, and her friends, and we all sat around and watched that movie, and I remember feeling like it was so bad that I was watching a Rated R movie”, she laughed. That Minnie does, and that she emerges with her dignity intact, is the movie’s biggest provocation. At one point Minnie yearns for someone to press his body against hers so that she knows that she is alive, a cry for love so poignant it’s hard to fault Minnie for seeking it wherever she can. But indeed, Minnie does know, and she acts.

Threaded through the story are news reports about Patty Hearst, the heiress kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army who joins its cause. He is one of those male sleeping beauties drifting through life, awakened occasionally by sex, but unaccountable to anyone.

“For Minnie, that’s where this chapter of her life begins”, she said. Bio-Dad is out of the picture.

What, New York’s not worthy of drag? In a matter of months, Minnie has more sex than some of us will have in years and does more drugs than most of us will do in a lifetime.

Such fleeting, contrary emotions of exuberance and self-doubt pinball throughout “Diary of a Teenage Girl”, a movie with a firm grip on how it feels to be a precocious 15-year-old in burning pursuit of self-discovery.

Too many teen sex movies confuse loss of virginity with onset of adulthood. Christopher Meloni is Minnie’s patronizing stepdad, Pascal, the only grown-up in the movie who at least seems to be attempting to impersonate an adult, albeit in an I’ve-read-Freud-and-you-haven’t kind of way.