The Diary of a Teenage Girl

Minnie Goetze is fifteen, lives in San Francisco in the 1970s, and wants to become a comic artist. She records an audio diary in which she works through her feelings and her growing awareness of her own sexuality. Her life grows complicated when she becomes involved with Monroe, the man her mother Charlotte is seeing, a relationship she keeps from those around her.

The film is Marielle Heller's feature debut and also her first produced screenplay, adapted from Phoebe Gloeckner's graphic novel. Bel Powley plays Minnie, with Kristen Wiig as Charlotte and Alexander Skarsgård as Monroe; Christopher Meloni, Austin Lyon and Madeleine Waters appear in supporting roles, and the credited cast numbers twenty-two. It was produced by Anne Carey, Miranda Bailey and Bert Hamelinck for Archer Gray, Cold Iron Pictures and Caviar on a budget of two million dollars. It is the first of five features Heller has directed, ahead of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and Nightbitch.

The film drew strong notices from critics, whose rating of eight out of ten across 168 reviews is well above the audience scores of 6.8 out of ten on IMDb and 6.6 out of ten on TMDB, where the vote counts differ considerably. Commercially it stayed modest, taking about one million dollars worldwide against its production budget.