How to Build a Girl hides a profound story of identity under a layer of cheekiness

"I do not think my adventure starts with a boy," Johanna Morrigan says at the start of How To Build A Girl.

"It starts with me." 

This sets the tone for everything you need to know about Johanna. 

A precocious young woman from Wolverhampton with no friends (except her older brother), a love for dogs, and a desire to do something great, Johanna (played by Beanie Feldstein) sets out to become a music journalist. 

She quickly learns that her sunny disposition won't sell magazines, so reinvents herself as Dolly Wilde, the hip music critic with a mean streak as razor-sharp as her wit. The accolades come pouring in at an increasingly steep cost until she must reassess and rebuild. 

Based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Caitlin Moran who also adapted the screenplay, How To Build A Girl addresses what it means to be a woman in a frank and unflinching way. 

"My job," Moran said, "is to sit and think about what it's like to be a woman and give you some options." 

It's a job she takes seriously. 

Moran points out how women often self-deprecate to appear less threatening, almost as a means of undermining our own authority, a sentiment she does not support. 

"I absolutely think people should listen to me," she says as an example, adding "I'm a mother, I'm the oldest of eight kids, and I've got some important information. I'd like to share it with you." 

But the process of writing both the book and adapting the source material for the screen was a harried one. 

"It was written in such a huge panic and a hurry," Moran says. Moran was doing a feature for the Times and had decided precisely what it would be about. 

"I rang up my editor and [told her] I wanted to do a cover feature. I reckon it'd be about 3000 words, and I just want to write about modern feminism now." 

That exploration would prove complex, as Caitlin added "if you have, I don't know, dreams of being sexually dominated by Jane Fonda, does that mean you're a feminist or not? And I want to write about masturbation and pubic hair and all this kind of stuff." 

Turns out that idea was most definitely more than 3000 words, and both she and her editor agreed it should be a book. The book deal came through immediately with the manuscript due in five month's time, all while she was writing three weekly columns for the Times. 

Moran wrote it in such a frenzy that, when she was recording the audiobook, she was shocked by what she got away with. 

"I was reading the book going 'fucking hell, this is really rude! Did I write this? This is fruity! Are you allowed to say this?'" 

But beneath the cheekiness lay a profound story of identity, self, and feminism. 

"Our journey together on the script was kind of extraordinary," director Coky Giedroyc said of the adaptation process. "It was a year and a half. She'd already developed it, so there was a script in existence. And I came in and my job really was to tease out the more emotional, heart-wrenching bits of the story that had got lost in the comedy a bit." 

"And so it was finding that balance," she continues, "of joyful, hilarious and also a little bit heartbreaking." The end result was perfect, offering audiences a profound sense of nostalgia, longing, and hopefulness. 

"It's a little bit of wish fulfillment," Moran said of casting Beanie Feldstein as the titular pseudo-Caitlin. "Like, I wish I'd seen a teenage girl who was doing that when I was 16. Because then I would have had the options that I didn't actually realize that I had until I was in my 20s."

"Someone else said to me 'I wish I'd known this then'," Giedroyc says. "You know, I wish I'd known what she's telling me now then." 

The core concept of the film is that we're never really done building the person we want to be. We make mistakes and tear down the parts of our lives we love most, and just have to rebuild. 

"In life," Giedroyc said, "I sort of think that if it isn't a constant reappraisal and a rebuilding, then it would just be boring, wouldn't it?"

Feldstein closes out the film with a heartfelt, expertly delivered monologue on our fallibility as humans, and especially as women. 

"The producer and I were just in floods of tears," Giedroyc explained of shooting the scene, "because it felt so incredibly truthful and spoke to what lots of us felt and feel." 

Johanna, Feldstein's pseudo-fictionalized portrayal of Moran, is equally as precocious as the writer herself. Much of the story is based, however loosely, on Moran's experience growing up in Wolverhampton and dropping out of high school to become a writer. But this precocity is met with resistance and, often, disdain from her colleagues, an issue many women in media face on an ongoing basis.

"There's a lot of fear around female empowerment," Giedroyc explains. "Always in history, there's been fear of women's hysteria or lack of control. I'm sensing in the air a little bit more acceptance and more interest. And people are finally understanding, certainly in our industry that women's stories and women's storytelling, a woman's perspective, is actually an interesting and then a valid one."