How to build a STAR
Booksmart Beanie takes on the Black Country ...
How To Build A Girl (Amazon Prime Video, 15)
Verdict: Determinedly quirky
Stage Mother (cinemas nationwide, 15)
Verdict: Cliche-ridden and predictable
EVEN though she turned 27 a month ago today, the actress Beanie Feldstein can pass for a decade or more younger, which is one reason why she keeps being cast in comingof-age films such as Lady Bird (2017) and last year’s Booksmart.
All the same, she was a bold choice to play Johanna Morrigan, the lead character in How To Build A Girl, which is based on the journalist Caitlin Moran’s semiautobiographical novel of the same name.
Moran (who also wrote the screenplay) grew up in Wolverhampton, Feldstein in Los Angeles. And while we’re used to actors bridging that transatlantic divide in both directions, I’m struggling to think of anyone quite so Californian who’s ever had to convince us they’re the product of a Black Country council estate before.
I wish I could say Tom Hanks as Noddy Holder in the Slade biopic, but regrettably it hasn’t happened. Yet.
That Feldstein does convince is credit to her hard work tackling the dialect, which by all accounts included a couple of weeks working anonymously in a Wolverhampton gift shop. In truth, she doesn’t always quite nail it, but she’s no Dick Van Dyke. The accent is close enough, and in a way it also helps that Johanna’s personal horizons stretch well beyond Dudley and even Kidderminster.
SHE wants to grow up to be a woman of the world, a writer. In an area once famous for its industrial furnaces (an awful lot of soot, hence the Black Country), her lively imagination is stoked by pictures of role models on her bedroom wall, all of whom come alive to offer her guidance.
Moran and director Coky Giedroyc have plenty of fun with this. Michael Sheen plays Sigmund Freud, with Lily Allen as Elizabeth Taylor; Alexei Sayle as Karl Marx; Gemma Arterton as Maria Von Trapp; and as a couple of Brontes, Sue Perkins and the director’s sister Mel Giedroyc.
Inconveniently for Johanna, reality intervenes all too often, in the form of numerous siblings, her amiable but feckless dreamer of a father (Paddy Considine), a mother (Sarah Solemani) worn out by too much childcare (‘I’d kill the last panda on earth for a bit of shut-eye’), and the school bullies obligatory in all coming-ofage movies.
Eventually, she finds her way to London, having written to a music magazine — a thinly disguised NME — offering to contribute reviews.
The odds are strongly stacked against her. She’s only 16, the mag is run by misogynists, and she knows so little about music that she’s barely aware of The Rolling Stones.
But she powers on with charisma and chutzpah, dyeing her hair red, reinventing herself as Dolly Wilde and even becoming the protegee of a rock star (Alfie Allen) with whom she falls hopelessly in love.
She gets a column, acquires groupies of her own and becomes known for her caustic one-liners … not that I, personally, can forgive Dolly, or Johanna, or Moran, or whoever was responsible for ‘Joni Mitchell has the voice of an angel and the face of a Grand National winner’, but never mind.
With fleeting roles for Emma Thompson and Chris O’Dowd, there is no shortage of star wattage here (I can tell you, by the way, that Wolverhampton’s city motto is ‘out of darkness cometh light’, which seems an apt slogan for this film, and is also why Wolverhampton Wanderers FC wear colours of black and gold).
But it’s Feldstein’s show, and although at times How To Build A Girl is just too determinedly quirky, she really couldn’t be a more engaging lead.
STAGE MOTHER has another strong female lead, and features another transoceanic accent hop, but alas this ‘bittersweet’ comedy about the director of a Baptist church choir in small-town Texas (played by the excellent Australian actress Jacki Weaver) who inherits her late, estranged son’s drag club in San Francisco, is mostly a dud.
It’s the sort of attempted crowdpleaser we Brits tend to do much better; I’m thinking of The Full Monty, Pride, Calendar Girls, Billy Elliot and the recent Military Wives.
Or maybe it’s just not very wellwritten, which makes a tried-and-tested formula look terribly stale.
Unhelpfully, there’s also some desperately clunky acting and a thudding predictability about every narrative twist that makes it fun to watch only if you like to beat characters to their own lines.