“I wonder if anyone loves me that I don’t know about,” wonders Minnie Goetze (Bel Powley) in the new trailer for The Diary of a Teenage Girl, a coming-of-age tale that won rave reviews at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. Minnie has just had sex for the first time, and she is glowing. The world—which for Minnie is San Francisco in the 1970s—looks entirely different than it did the day before, everywhere a hint of the possibility for love. The only potential complication? She slept with her mother’s boyfriend.
The film offers the first major role for the British Powley, with the cast rounded out by Kristen Wiig as her mother and Alexander Skarsgård as their shared love interest. The trailer offers a glimpse of the film’s unique visual style, a color palate of 1970s-era yellows and browns blended with animation that appears to pay tribute to the eponymous graphic novel, by Phoebe Gloeckner, from which the film was adapted.
In an interview with Sundance, first-time director Marielle Heller explained that the film is not a “morality tale.” “We’re not trying to pass judgment on this relationship or this girl or what she’s going through,” she explained. “We’re just trying to show honestly what it feels like to be a teenage girl.”
The Diary of a Teenage Girl hits theaters Aug. 7.
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