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The Diary of a Teenage Girl is very upfront about its subject matter: sex. There’s some drugs, there’s some teen anxieties, there’s some dancing and drinking and a tiny smidgen of school. But it’s not really very interested in those other trappings of precocious adolescence. It begins with a bum: Minnie Goetze struts confidently through a park on a sunny day in San Francisco, blue bell-bottoms clinging to her 15 year-old body, only faltering for a moment when a pair of big, bouncing boobs clad in a scarlet jogging suit catch her eye. She sees breasts everywhere, and they seem to stare right back at her, taunting her, attracting her, and making her look down at her own chest with a mixture of horror and admiration. It’s a film for girls right from the off.

Based on Phoebe Gloeckner’s graphic novel of the same name, the film charts the first sexual experiences of Minnie, a girl growing up in a tumultuous, druggy household in downtown San Francisco who loses her virginity to her mother’s boyfriend. The trailer doesn’t really prepare you for the extent of outrageously inappropriate behaviour going on in this film, but you get used to it pretty quickly. Director Marielle Heller approaches the mutual seduction of Minnie and her mother’s 35 year old beau with a distinctly analytical but emotionally detached lens, and both parties get their stories heard. Heller’s reluctance to dramatise the interactions makes for a story that’s a little hard to care about, but very enjoyable to watch play out. Despite largely steering clear of judgement, the film does make a few nods to society’s lack of ability to maturely deal with the situations it explores. Caught between her rampant sexual desire (which is a desire for her new self as much as for any man) and the awkward fact that she is a child, what is Minnie to do? How is she to know what decisions are acceptable to herself and others when her mother sits her down after school and tells her that since she “won’t have that bod forever, Min” she had better start using it, while her classmates call her a slut? It’s a world where the frightfully ambiguous notion of sexual power creates a landscape very difficult for any young woman to navigate.

Bel Powley’s Minnie is full of youthful exuberance and a confidence she doesn’t know she has. Even at the beginning, the lip-biting, eye-wobbling girl is more self-assured than she thinks she is, at least relative to the adult characters. The film in general paints adolescent uncertainty against a backdrop of crushing adult anxiety that heavily downplays the genre’s usual focus on teen angst and makes the traditionally fragile Teenage Girl the strongest player in the game. By the second half of the film she has come to realise her status, envisioning herself as a cartoon giant knocking down the men in her path with passion and a touch of hard-earned aloofness. At the end of the day, it is not her own fragility but the naked vulnerability of her supposed guardians that scares her.

Perhaps the film’s great achievement is not that it somehow turns a blind eye to what many people will see as the sexual abuse of a minor, but that it turns the focus from political and societal notions of ‘acceptability’ and takes a closer look at how people might actually feel and act when sex is a motivation. The mother, Monroe, and Minnie are all individuals caught in a lust triangle – their age and relationship statuses are complicating factors, but they are secondary to the fact that what motivates all three of them is a desire to have sex (and be loved). If there’s something audiences are likely to be uncomfortable with, it is probably just how much this young girl’s decisions are motivated by and justified by sexual desire. This was the rationale given by those who were angered that the film didn’t receive its hoped-for 15s rating in the UK, although how they ever thought a film with so many extended scenes of statutory rape wasn’t going to be slapped with an 18s tag is beyond me. Minnie isn’t painted as a victim or a wily manipulator, and it is certainly unusual to see a portrayal of a young girl’s sexual misadventures on screen, free from overtones of tragedy or cynicism (it is noteworthy that the two holy-shit moments happen when hard drugs come on the scene, keeping sex in the clear as a potential villain).

This is a solidly entertaining film with some nice touches of humour and style. A scene in which the naive Minnie is literally dropped by Monroe when her mother comes in is particularly funny, and the cartoons that occasionally meander across the screen add insight into Minnie’s perception of herself and others. The music and colour palette paint an attractive portrait of 70s San Francisco that you can turn your attention to if you get bored with the sheer amount of sex, which isn’t gratuitous but reflective of an obsessive teenage mentality. Well worth a watch.