Kriten Wiig, Bel Powley and Alexander Skarsgard in Diary of a Teenage Girl.

There are precious few coming-of-age films that show sex from a woman’s perspective; even fewer about what it looks like for an adolescent girl. Marielle Heller’s Diary of a Teenage Girl, which you should see pronto, is one of them.

Without defaulting to the man-made double-binds of silly virgin/stupid skank, Heller, who is fortunate in her choice of actress Bel Powley, follows Our Heroine through the Teenage Tunnel of Hell and back into the light.

As a mother of a teenage girl, I experienced considerable agitation in this story of a 15-year-old who has an affair with her mother’s 35-year-old boyfriend. Yet as a onetime teenage girl, I recognized the messy, inappropriate, envelope-pushing, boundary-crossing truths of adolescent sexuality. (Is she being exploited? Yes. Is she in control of her own body? Yes. But this is no “Lolita.”) And as a film critic, I was grateful for a movie that did not eroticize young female bodies and then punish the characters for having sex.

Here is my review. And tell me the sexual of coming-of-age films that don’t exploit their female characters. After Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Clueless, Love and Basketball and Pariah…what?