It wasn't so long ago that it would have been an act of movie-marketing suicide to put a film as smart, sassy and against the conventional grain as director/co-writer Marielle Heller's The Diary of a Teenage Girl out for the summer mall crowd. Based on Phoebe Gloekner's 2002 graphic novel, the film's chirpy 15-year-old heroine proclaims her battle plan for surviving the season in San Francisco, circa 1976, a city just past the "Summer of Love," but still chock-full of hypersexed teenage boys. Sprawled out on her bed, our heroine spells out her summer strategy.
"My name is Minnie Goetze, and I'm recording this onto cassette tape because my life has gotten real crazy of late. I had sex today! This makes me officially an adult! Now, if you're listening to this without my permission, please stop now. Just stop!"
Diary of a Teenage Girl is hardly up to the exalted standards of Mike Nichols' sublime 1967 coming-of-age classic The Graduate. But with its cute asides where Minnie goes tripping down the block in visual tandem with her animated twin, the film gives tacit permission to an online generation of girls eager to trade chat rooms for the adventures and perils of the streets.
Ironically, like The Graduate, Diary contains its own sly inside-production joke. In 1967, Dustin Hoffman, then just past 30, was set to sign with comedy writer/aspiring filmmaker Mel Brooks for his big-screen debut. Instead, Hoffman got the career-making call to impersonate the hero of Charles Webb's cult novel hit, the 21-year-old suburban-LA-residing Benjamin Braddock. At that moment in America's ongoing sexual revolution, the summer affair between Benjamin and his dad's partner's wife Mrs. Robinson (a luminous Anne Bancroft, the real-life wife of Mel Brooks) was thought to be edgy, provocative. In reality, the then-38-year-old Bancroft was only a life cycle older than Hoffman, cast against type. But at the time, the efforts by Bancroft's Mrs. Robinson to seduce Benjamin and thus block the boy from dating her own college-age daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross) were still quite shocking in many parts of America. It was a bond that would provide Mike Nichols with a Best Director Oscar.
Diary of a Teenage Girl's "Mrs. Robinson" moment is still capable of rocking the boat in an America with AIDS. Here, the mom Charlotte (Kristin Wiig) is having her own affair, post-Minnie's-dad, with 30-something Monroe Rutherford (a very cute Alexander Skarsgard). Feeling her oats, she gives Minnie full permission to go after those silly little bellbottom-jeans-wearing boys at her high school.
Charlotte: "I don't want to brag, but I was quite a piece when I was your age. What's wrong with you? I thought you'd be more into boys. You have that kind of power, you know. You just don't know it yet."
Diary of a Teenage Girl is not a great film, but possibly it is a mores-setting summer tent-pole for its time, with the British actress Bel Powley, already in her 20s, giving her Minnie the same delicious ride that Dustin Hoffman pulled off with his Benjamin Braddock. Not to spoil everything for you, but Diary of a Teenage Girl does have its own great plot-hook for LGBTQ moviegoers.