Caitlin Moran’s Kirkus-starred 2014 novel, How to Build a Girl, tells the story of Johanna Morrigan, a nerdy early-1990s teenager from a poor family in Wolverhampton, England, who becomes a successful music journalist known as Dolly Wilde, due in part to her scathing music reviews for the fictional rock rag D and ME (Disc and Music Echo). The former shrinking violet becomes the queen of the London music scene and has plenty of (mostly unsatisfying) sex along the way. In the end, though, she becomes disillusioned with her mean-spirited reviewer persona, as she falls (platonically) for an older musician who’s just as quirky as she is.

The above summary works, in its broad strokes, for the new film adaptation starring Booksmart’s Beanie Feldstein, which premieres on video-on-demand on May 8. But the devil is in the details—and the movie gets them wrong.

Although Moran told Kirkus’ Megan Labrise in 2014 that she based Johanna, in part, on New Musical Express journalist Julie Burchill, it’s clear that her book is autobiographical in many, many ways. Like Johanna, Moran grew up poor in Wolverhampton in a large family with an ex-rock-musician father. More to the point, she found success as a teenager writing for a music magazine (in Moran’s case, Melody Maker) in the early ’90s.

In the book, Johanna’s (and the author’s) clear love of rock music radiates from nearly every page. Johanna sees music fandom as a way to completely reinvent herself, and she religiously listens to John Peel’s Radio 1 show to discover cutting-edge bands. She checks out feedback-drenched records from her local library, which she finds simultaneously terrifying and fascinating. When she discovers the amped-up prose of British music criticism (“This is the sound of God exploding—slowly. And the debris hitting Dalí in the face”), she thinks, “I love this stuff. I could do this.” So she writes reviews of the bands Ride, Manic Street Preachers, Jane’s Addiction, Belly, Suede, the Stone Roses, Aztec Camera, the Lilac Time, and My Bloody Valentine, and submits them to D and ME.

The movie version can’t be bothered with any of this. Its version of Johanna naïvely submits a review of the Annie soundtrack to D and ME—something not even most naïve musical-theater nerd would ever do. In the book, Johanna sees Miki Berenyi, the singer and guitarist of the English band Lush, as the very essence of cool, and she dyes her hair fire-engine red to emulate her. In the film, when Johanna colors her hair, there’s no explanation, no inspiration, no nothing—and Berenyi, who is the essence of cool, is nowhere to be found:

Worst of all, the film gives viewers absolutely no sense of the ‘90s music scene, other than an occasional soundtrack cue (including an admittedly brilliant use of Elastica’s 1994 kiss-off classic,  “Connection”) and an all-too-brief scene of Johanna attending a Manic Street Preachers show. In most movies, this would be no big deal, really—but in the book, music is everything; here, it’s just…a thing.

The movie has other flaws, as well—including Feldstein’s botched attempt at British dialect, which is a shame, because her performance is otherwise charming. Game of Thrones’ Alfie Allen, as her Jeff Buckley-esque love interest, is also appealing, if toned down from the book’s drunken oddball. The screenplay tries to inject more drama into their relationship by adding a bizarre, out-of-character betrayal, but it simply doesn’t work. Almost none of the changes work, which makes it all the more puzzling that it was co-written by Moran herself. The novel tells a truly inspiring story of a young woman taking control of her own destiny. The film, by contrast, mostly tells the story of an American actor trying to take control of a Wolverhampton accent.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.