Diary Of A Teenage Girl

As the Sundance Film Festival returns to Park City, Utah with another round of cutting edge independent films, we're reminded of the movies from last year that (although critically acclaimed) haven't received any love from the Golden Globes or the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Whether developed in the Sundance Lab or chosen from the thousands of submissions to the festival each year, Park City's most famous annual event rarely provides the easy answers that are applauded by Academy voters.

"The Diary of a Teenage Girl," developed in the Sundance Labs by writer/director Marielle Heller from the book by Phoebe Gloeckner, is just the kind of morally murky material that frightens the Hollywood establishment, but that is nonetheless a feat to behold.

Bel Powley, Kristen Wiig and Alexander Skarsgard step up to the plate with sensational poise as a fucked-up family of well-meaning and badly behaved San Franciscans at the end of the hippie movement.

Minnie (played with startling honesty by Powley) is a 16- year-old with an auto tape diary, a desire to be an illustrator and a little bit of a crush on her mom's sexy boyfriend Munroe (Skarsgard). Minnie's mom (Wiig) -- with her flagrant drinking and drug use and her appalling ideas about a woman's value being based on her sexual attractiveness -- provides no great prize as a parent. But the girl's nearly live-in father figure Munroe is an even better role model: he begins a sexual affair with his girlfriend's teenage daughter.

Minnie's journey to empowerment may be arduous, full of self-doubt, physical codependence and deception, but it's also full of some satisfying sexual and artistic experimentation that hardly leaves her as a victim.

Skarsgard is desperately attractive as the sexual predator with a heart of gold. And Wiig once again impresses in one of her dramatic, yet still funny and reliably human roles.

The cinematography (Brandon Trost), the production design (Jonah Markowitz) and animation (Sara Gunnarsdottir) are simply beautiful as they recreate the city by the bay in the hedonistic '70s.

Yes, this is the kind of movie that gives female actors and filmmakers a chance to really shine, but it's not the type of flick that the Hollywood hierarchy is going to champion anytime soon.

The special features on this Blu-ray, including deleted scenes, a making-of featurette, a Q&A at the LA Film Festival and commentaries with the cast and the director certainly bring insight into the filmmaker's journey.

"The Diary of a Teenage Girl"
Blu-ray
$24.99
www.SonyClassics.com