Frank, complex ‘Diary of a Teenage Girl’ hits theaters

“You have a kind of power, you know”, Charlotte says. “This is a risky piece of work”, Kominsky went on.

It’s scandalous material, but Heller takes the sensationalism out of this not untypical memoir. This starts out with innocent teen stuff – flowers and hearts and teddy bears, but as the film progresses and Minnie becomes increasingly preoccupied with sex (“Does anyone think about f**king as much as I do?”), the illustrations take on the more erotic and perverse characteristics of the underground comic books she treasures (penises popping out of trousers – that sort of stuff).

This isn’t a morality play – like so much of what Hollywood turns out concerning wayward girls – for which the only acceptable outcome is punishment. She didn’t flinch, though.

“The Diary of a Teenage Girl” was a breakout hit at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. (It expands to new cities in Canada this weekend.) Apparently, people were just as hungry for this story as Heller herself was when she first read Gloeckner’s novel 10 years ago.

“Maybe you’re a nympho”, Aline says. (Minnie’s father is long gone, and there’s an ex-stepfather in New York, a fussy academic played by Christopher Meloni.) As is true of Gloeckner’s novel, “Diary” is fairly ruthless about the ways a girl can see her mother as emblematic of everything wrong with the entire universe before flipping, without quite knowing how, into something closer to shared sisterhood. I was sexually active at a young age.

“She feels like a hero to me“, Heller says, “really flawed, totally human, but a hero – this teenage girl whom we were trying to honor”. “I thought I must be a boy, because I’d never seen a representation of girls having the types of thoughts I was having”.

Female sexuality has typically been so constrained by the movies that “Diary of a Teenage Girl” feels nearly radical in its portrait of empowering promiscuity.

In a separate phone interview, Powley agreed – so enthusiastically that she choked on her gum, and had to pause for a sip of water. “As a boy, anything you do, it’s hilarious and fine”.

“Quiet”, thankfully, is not a word one would apply to Powley, 23. The British actress turned 23 this past March. “You just don’t know it yet”.

That choice, Heller told me, was created to reflect the reality of growing up as a young woman in the United States. “I was surprised, because I didn’t remember there being that much sex in the script”, she says.

Skarsgård places a lot of credit with Heller, who worked on this movie as writer and director for eight years, and Powley, who he says the film couldn’t have worked without.

The film’s unblinking, nonjudgmental depiction of Minnie’s sexual desire and awakening is a rarity. “I wanted future generations of women to have that character to look at”.

The adults in Minnie’s world are mostly self-absorbed and useless. This is an abusive relationship, where he’s taking advantage of her, but like most abusive situations, it’s not so black and white where there’s a virginal victim and a predator. Many women have feelings of love mixed in, and feelings of empowerment. “Holy s–.” Minnie smiles to herself, but her glow momentarily fades when a buxom blonde jogs past her. Minnie, at times, seems as if she’s unable to see herself as a whole person but, rather, as a collection of parts that either do or don’t match up to some ideal. There’s also a scene every woman recognizes with a flush of shame: Monroe shows weakness, and Minnie loses interest. It’s Minnie who’s obsessed with punching her V-card; Monroe is more an instrument than an equal. “It makes men very sad”.

That’s what I got out of this movie. “We live in a patriarchy where people think of females either as presexual girls or as fully sexual, adult women”. They may not be engaged in the battle they expected.

Happily for the filmmakers, audiences are seeing the film the way they intended. But they’re certainly not being ignored.