Glasgow Film Festival review: How to Build a Girl

Drawing this year’s Glasgow Film Festival to a close, How to Build a Girl struggles to bring Caitlin Moran’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel to life with the sharpness of the columnist’s own writing. Mythologising her teenage journey to become a music critic for Melody Maker in the early 1990s, Moran’s script suffers the same problem as the film version of co-screenwriter John Niven’s 1990s-set music industry novel Kill Your Friends: the caustic wit and customary warmth of her prose sounds flat and contrived coming out of the mouths of the characters on screen.

Beanie Feldstein in How to Build a Girl

How to Build a Girl ** 

That’s too bad because even with a distracting Midlands accent, Booksmart star Beanie Feldstein is well-cast as Moran cypher Johanna Morrigan, an irrepressibly smart working-class girl who lands a gig writing for NME sound-alike the D&ME (short for the Disc and Music Echo) after submitting an earnest review of the Annie soundtrack that the music weekly’s Oxbridge-dominated staff think is a piss-take.


As both Johanna and Johanna’s cynical alter-ego, Dolly Wilde, whom she invents after imbibing her fellow hacks’ cooler-than-thou approach to music criticism, Feldstein has the right mix of vulnerability and brazen self-confidence to sell us on the complex performative nature of adolescence.


Alas, as Johanna learns the error of her ways, the film, which is directed by Coky Giedroyc, transforms into a weird mea culpa for having strong opinions on mediocre art. By those standards it probably expects a pass.