A coming-of-age tale rendered with humour, sensitivity and intelligence, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is a marvellous look at adolescence which is frank but also affectionately attuned to the excitement and confusion of being young. Adapting Judy Blume’s beloved 53-year-old novel, writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig assembles a terrific cast led by Abby Ryder Fortson, who plays the titular 11-year-old as an openhearted, curious girl who is trying to understand both her changing body and the complexities of the world around her. Whether exploring religious faith or the unknowability of cute boys, Margaret treats childhood rites of passage in an honest, moving fashion which is generous to the story’s well-drawn, lived-in characters

We first meet Margaret in the early seventies at summer camp, a utopia of gloriously embodied girlhood: swimming, jumping, laughing, eating with her friends, the girls fully expressing a sense of liberated, uninhibited joy in their bodies, unscrutinized and unimpeded by outside forces

This montage is a brilliant introduction to the story, emphasizing the rude awakening Margaret experiences when she’s ripped from her childhood home, a cozy, bohemian Manhattan apartment, and deposited across the river in a New Jersey suburb, separated from her dear grandmother Sylvia (Kathy Bates). It’s an upwardly mobile move that nevertheless leaves the Simon family floundering for their identities – Christian mother Barbara (Rachel McAdams) struggles to be a good housewife, while Jewish father Herb (Benny Safdie) flails at garden work, and Margaret must wade into the lion’s den that is the sixth grade (11 to 12 -year-olds), with all its attendant gender politics

A bewildered Margaret is thrown into the gantlet of adolescence via her new neighbour, the unabashed and bold Nancy (Elle Graham), who introduces our heroine to bust-increasing exercises and the necessity of practicing kissing on a bedpost. In Nancy’s “secret club” (no socks allowed), Margaret finds a much-needed group of allies and a supposed safe space in which the girls talk with anxiety and excitement about the realities of puberty. But Nancy rules with an iron fist, fomenting a toxic dynamic of competition and bullying

Much of “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” is about the private and often confusing physical details of changing bodies and the harrowing journey of navigating these transitions in relation to other people. But it’s also about the way that Margaret develops as a person – intellectually, morally and spiritually. With a Jewish father and a Christian mother who raise her in a religious void, her teacher, Mr. Benedict (Echo Kellum), suggests Margaret do a research project on the subject of religion

She tries out temple to the delight of Sylvia, as well as a Southern Baptist church, a Protestant Christmas Eve Mass and even dabbles in Catholic confession. All the while, she chats with God about her innermost thoughts and feelings, processing the complexities of her social and family life. Whether or not she believes, Margaret’s God is a confidant and friend that exists outside the power struggles and religious divisions that have shaped her family life for better or for worse

Director Fremon Craig brings a fluidity and easy rhythm to the film, which is highly specific to its temporal setting but fresh and contemporary too. His film is full of funny, rich detail: Nancy’s casual snobbery, firing off lines like “I live in the bigger house up the street” like she’s in her own reality show; the way Margaret’s plaid back-to-school dress is a little too big, so she can grow into it; the bad-boy grin of sixth-grade heartthrob Philip Leroy (Zackary Brooks); Mr. Benedict’s the eager nervousness; Kathy Bates hamming it up delightfully as Margaret’s very dramatic grandmother Sylvia. And Fortson, wide-eyed and sweetly vulnerable, invites us on every step of Margaret’s journey. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is both lovingly faithful to its source, but also highlights that so many of these questions and issues remain the same, five decades later