British author Caitlin Moran’s teenage rock critic, Dolly Wilde, is coming to America.
This past Saturday, at the annual American Film Market conference/deal-making event in Santa Monica, California, IFC Films announced that it purchased the North American rights to release How to Build a Girl, a movie version of Moran’s Kirkus-starred 2014 novel, according to Deadline.
The American-British film, which stars Booksmart’s Beanie Feldstein and Game of Thrones’ Alfie Allen, features a screenplay co-written by Moran and author John Niven, who previously penned the screenplay for a 2015 film of his 2009 novel Kill Your Friends. It’s directed by Coky Giedroyc, who previously helmed the 1999 movie adaptation of Isla Dewar’s 1996 novel Women Talking Dirty, and it will be released in the United States and Canada sometime in 2020.
Moran’s novel, set in the late 1980s and early ’90s, tells the tale of an adventurous English teenager, Johanna Morrigan, who drops out of school to become a music journalist known as Dolly Wilde and later falls in love with an older rock star. In a starred review, Kirkus’ critic called the novel a “Hilarious autobiographical fiction debut for Britain’s Lena Dunham—if you can forgive a dot too much nasty sex and poignant lessons learned.” (A sequel, How to Be Famous, was published last year.)
Like her protagonist, Moran began her own career as a rock critic in her teens, during the same era. However, she claimed to Kirkus’ Megan Labrise in 2014 that “Johanna’s metamorphosis into bold Dolly, a biting critic and self-proclaimed ‘lady sex pirate,’ more closely resembles New Musical Express journalist Julie Burchill.” Moran also noted that her own dislike of E.L. James’ 2012 bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey helped to inspire How to Build a Girl: “Something like Fifty Shades of Grey—where [a young woman is] totally financially and sexually reliant on a man—is so the antithesis of everything I believe, everything that I want my teenage girls to [seek out] in their future, that I sat down and wrote a book!”
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
