In “How to Build a Girl”, Johanna Morrigan is a teenaged girl who reinvents herself as a worldly music critic, Dolly Wilde, complete with red hair and a scathing penchant for tearing down musicians. Like her editors explain to her, controversy is what sells. No one wants to read columns of adulation and praise. Johanna’s transformation into a take-no-prisoner critic is both practical and fantastical. By this point in the film, Johanna is supporting her dysfunctional family, with her slew of increasingly unethical music reviews. But she’s also living out a fantasy – finally able to be popular, and in control of her destiny, after living her life as a nobody on her family’s council estate in Wolverhampton. Johanna needs a win, no matter how faulty. And in the persona of Dolly, she’s able to get it. Even if temporarily.
Fantasy is a reliable foundation to build a coming-of-age tale on, and in that way “How to Build a Girl” is incredibly familiar as it thrusts the audience into a fantastical coming-of-age journey that is marked by the improbable more than anything else. If you look at it from the right angle, you might see how the relentlessness that marks “How to Build a Girl” could be instructive. Coky Giedroyc’s direction feels shaggily hewn to the perspective of the mercurial heroine, Johanna. And Caitlin Moran’s screenplay, adapted from her own novel-quasi-memoir, feels aware enough of its ridiculousness to sustain itself, even when it cannot hold. But, “How to Build a Girl” is built on rocky foundations, despite all its good intentions. It’s one thing for a film to be built on fantasy, but the more “How to Build a Girl” progresses, the more it reveals that it does not seem to have a real perspective on anything that it represents – not music, not writing and not even its cheeky heroine.
From the onset, the coming-of-age comedy film is building and riffing on a number of familiar sources. Significantly, one might see “How to Build a Girl” as a welcome female perspective on something like “Almost Famous” or “High Fidelity” which allows a necessary feminist angle on the familiar angle of writing as a crucible for a teenager’s coming-of-age. It’s no surprise that Jo March, from “Little Women”, is one of the idols on Johanna’s wall of women she aspires to be. And “How to Build a Girl” always has its heart firmly in the right, progressive, place. But for a film which finds Johanna’s alter-ego Dolly making inroads in the music-criticism world, “How to Build a Girl” is bafflingly disinterested in gaining any kind of narrative or artistic perspective on what music means to Johanna, Dolly, or any one in the film.
After the necessary prologue where we learn that Johanna’s life is one of bleakness (dysfunctional family? Check. Social pariah? Check. Friendless? Check. Nerd? Check.), the film’s real arc begins when she applies for a writing job at a London newspaper. Despite her father’s aspiring rock hopes, dashed to pieces decades before, Johanna is not very passionate about music. She decides to submit a review of the Annie soundtrack which amuses the staff. They hire her more for the novelty of her unusualness than for any belief in her. The plot-point is meant to mark Johanna’s unwavering sincerity in the face of the jaded, all-male, writing staff. But it’s the first keynote that strains credulity and becomes a pattern for the film’s own sloppiness. For all of Johanna’s naivete, why this intelligent 16-year old would think a review of the decades-old Annie soundtrack would make sense for a rock-music magazine is something that the film never cares to investigate. And it’s the first of a number of red-flags where we realise that “How to Build a Girl” is building itself up in shoddy fashion – throwing varying pieces together, instead of considering the world its characters inhabit in any sincere or authentic way.
Moran’s screenplay keeps telling us that Johanna is a great writer, with a sharp ear for language but the film can never commit to reflecting this. And even as Johanna’s new persona of Dolly maintains an ironic detachment from the music she critiques, it seems like an inherent flaw that a film this steeped in music culture cannot register anything beyond mere ambivalence for the music scene of the early 90s. There’s an amusing arc which marks her rise in the world of criticism by her injudiciously nasty criticism, but it’s such a hackneyed trope. There’s little illuminating in arguing that criticism is not real writing.
In typical coming-of-age fashion, things are interrupted by the appearance of a potential beau – here played by Alfie Allen as John Kite, as a young musician of some fame. Kite’s appearance sparks a momentary reminder that music should be the bedrock of the film, even as his solo (well-sung) seems out of place in the early nineties Britpop-rock world the film seems to be representing. But Allen is a refreshing reprieve from the hitherto chaotic film. It’s an earnest and sincere take on a character that feels necessary to “How to Build a Girl” but soon ends up feeling out of place. The more the film leans into Allen’s sincerity, the more the sentimentality of that arc feels at odds with the relentless bathos of the world around Johanna.
By the end, things get resolved in exactly the kind of turgid way you would expect from a lesser coming-of-age romp. And it’s the high quality of the cast and team behind “How to Build a Girl,” including Beanie Feldstein’s valiant attempts to make the battling versions of Johanna work, that makes the genericity of the film we are given feel so much more disappointing and dispiriting. Nothing here is profound or thoughtful or even sincere. Even the film’s aesthetics don’t credibly reflect its early nineties world, seeming too modern in its representation of the past. By the time Emma Thompson shows up at the end to tell us the moral in a clunky scene, the entire thing feels like a lost cause. The artificiality of “How to Build a Girl” is not its issue. Movies as artifice can be one of their most delightful saving graces. But you can’t build a girl on good intentions and you can’t build a film on hints of value. “How to Build a Girl” does not register enough as its own thing. Its handle on its characters’ trips into banality more than anything, and even at its end it does not have the confidence in Johanna to have her liberate her own self. There’s not enough here to register as more than occasionally diverting, and so “How to Build a Girl” ends up falling apart.
