In Blume: "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret."

The fact it's taken fifty years to get Judy Blume's widely read Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret onto film tells us a lot about the kind of material Hollywood has deemed worthy of adaptation: we can apparently have all the boysy Batman and Spider-Man movies we want, but anything relating to the inner lives of teenage girls has tended to be kicked into the long grass until recently. The greatest tribute Kelly Fremon Craig's adaptation pays its source is to film the book as it could have been filmed at any time in the last half-century - and thus to insist, in some small and quiet yet potent way, that Blume's words and characters are just as much worthy of study today as they were from the off. Fremon Craig preserves the text's early 1970s setting, and - doubtless encouraged by producer James L. Brooks, a sure, steadying hand for the better part of the intervening decades - refuses to apply any Brady Bunch Movie or Barbie-like postmodern irony. Her version is very much It's Me, Margaret as filmed by someone who grew up supplementing her reading with annual rewatches of A Christmas Story, Stand by Me and The Princess Bride, who learnt from an early age that there is value in a good tale, cleanly and correctly told. This filmmaker - who broke through with 2016's enjoyable contemporary teenpic The Edge of Seventeen - isn't blind to the fact there are differences between growing up then and growing up now. But she's also aware that some things are eternal: period pains, training bras, the awkwardness of broaching bodily changes with close relatives, stupid boys, the radio-friendly hits of an era when music was still being built to last, and (most crucially of all) sensitive, intelligent, hands-on writing, playing and direction.

That careful positioning allows It's Me, Margaret to live and breathe as a period piece: it remains clear-eyed from first to last, and it's not winking at you every fifteen seconds, which comes as some relief. Fremon Craig's direction does just enough to acknowledge that, for all the progressive second-wave feminism of its outlook, Blume's book was a product of a post-War conservative consensus - the type of book an author only gets to write (and see published) from a position of relative financial and emotional stability. This results in what may be the only studio release of 2023 to centre exclusively on a white, middle-class family: though there are nods to diversity in the casting, the film is mostly set to describing the way things were for a certain stratum of American society, when the worst that could befall a sixth-grader (Abby Ryder Fortson) was moving to a roomy house in the suburbs, and the biggest dilemma her mother could face was what furniture to install in the lounge. This, in turn, gives rise to a cheeriness and optimism that in the context of the modern multiplex feels almost radical: It's Me, Margaret may also be one of the few 2023 releases that isn't Actually About Trauma in any way. (But then I would say that: I've never had to wear a training bra.) At any rate, Fremon Craig's script retains the gift Blume's prose had for raising adolescent concerns in a sympathetic, conversational, lightly funny way; if it sometimes feels a touch episodic, individual scenes have the advantage of carefully chosen personalities who play this material as it lies, and with an ease and grace that might in itself be considered instructive. You too might some day pass through any transitional phase without undue Sturm und Drang; you too will find your place, and possibly become a can-do Rachel McAdams or wisecracking Kathy Bates type. (We boys must settle for an unusually relaxed Safdie brother by way of an onscreen role model.) The book has provided great help and comfort for millions across the globe; my sense was that whatever its final box-office tally - and this strikes me as a production with a potentially longer tail than most - the film will do likewise.

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret is now playing in cinemas nationwide.