Glasgow Film Festival review: 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.
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Hide AdAlas, 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.
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