The COVID-19 pandemic has shut down movie theaters across the country, but fans of Caitlin Moran’s 2014 novel, How to Build a Girl, won’t have to wait for them to reopen to see the film version.
IFC Films will be releasing the movie, which stars Booksmart’s Beanie Feldstein and Game of Thrones’ Alfie Allen, on video-on-demand on May 8. The distributor unveiled a trailer on Wednesday.
In the novel, set in the late 1980s and early ’90s, an English teenager, Johanna Morrigan, becomes a successful music journalist known as Dolly Wilde and falls for an older rock star (whom she calls “the first person I’d ever met who made me feel normal”).
English author Moran was also a music journalist in her teens, but she told Kirkus’ Megan Labrise in a 2014 interview that “Johanna’s metamorphosis into bold Dolly…more closely resembles New Musical Express journalist Julie Burchill….‘[Burchill] was the biggest star of the time in print—more famous than the bands,’ she says admiringly. Whereas, in describing herself, Moran says: ‘I’m a bit shy, and I secretly like Fleetwood Mac.’”
Moran published a sequel, How To Be Famous, in 2018, which follows her rock critic’s continuing adventures in the ’90s. She cowrote the new movie’s screenplay with John Niven, who’s also a novelist; he previously penned the script for a 2015 film based on his 2009 book, Kill Your Friends.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
