Bel Powley and Alexander Skarsgård's graphic movie A comic-book movie with a difference, The Diary Of A Teenage Girl is based on a much-loved illustrated novel by Phoebe Gloeckner. It’s the kind of thing chin-stroking film critics (especially German one) might call a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age tale about a girl growing up in swinging San Francisco in the 1970s.