In the 53 years since the publication of Judy Blume’s breakthrough novel, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., some of her other works have been adapted, but never what is perhaps the author’s most defining book. Blume was long protective of Margaret, maybe fearing that its subject matter—a tweenage girl awaits her first period, worries about her breast size, and contemplates religion—would be sanded down, made less “controversial” by market-minded studios. But she eventually, after decades of entreaties, accepted an offer, from producer James L. Brooks and writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig. Was that protracted and principled holdout worth it?

For the most part, yes. The film, in theaters April 28, is at once light and serious, a warm and sensitive tribute to the book’s themes that avoids any unnecessary updating. Fremon Craig, whose last film was the excellent teen dramedy The Edge of Seventeen, gives the material just the right spin, letting Margaret and her friends exist wholly in their age. Like Netflix's great Baby-Sitters Club series, Margaret concerns kids in a tricky liminal time, between childhood and adolescence. The kids are eager to get themselves to the next phase, but Fremon Craig and, of course, Blume don’t rush them. Nor are they determined to keep Margaret and her friends wholly innocent. 

Margaret is played by Abby Ryder Fortson, already a seasoned veteran of the Marvel universe (she’s in one of the Ant-Man films) who ably renders Margaret’s guilelessness and occasional bouts of petulance. It’s understandable that Margaret should be frustrated sometimes: her parents, played by Rachel McAdams and Benny Safdie (of all people), have uprooted her from her beloved Manhattan and carted the family off to suburban New Jersey in 1970, leaving Margaret’s beloved grandmother, Sylvia (Kathy Bates), back in the city. It’s quite a destabilizing thing for a girl Margaret’s age, though this is a story of adjustments, not of a move gone horribly wrong.

Before too long, Margaret has fallen in with a queen-bee neighbor girl, Nancy (the very funny Elle Graham), and her cohort, who all seem more advanced in their awareness of their bodies, and of boys. Margaret rushes to catch up to them, while keeping her crush, on a friend of Nancy’s brother, a closely guarded secret. At home, Margaret has begun to wonder about her cultural identity. Her father is Jewish; her mother is a lapsed Christian who no longer speaks to her bigoted parents. So is Margaret Jewish? A Christian? Maybe she’s nothing, she realizes, in a search for self that consumes a surprisingly large amount of the narrative. 

I suppose it did in the book, too. (Hence the title.) The page, though, can provide the texture of internal monologue in a way the screen can’t, which may be why the religion part of the film feels stilted. Or maybe it’s the quaintness of this quest clashing against these brittle and brutal times of ours—and against an era in which so much young adult fiction is centered on romance in a way Margaret decidedly is not. It may also be that Fremon Craig could have better tailored her adaptation; in trying to hit every beat of the novel, the movie loses some shape. 

Where Margaret really excels is in its vignettes, when plot complications and social embarrassments that are a half-century old reveal their timelessness. A game of “Two Minutes in Heaven” (in my day it was seven; I guess we were more daring—or more concerned with rhyming—in the 1990s) leads to a new, fleeting infatuation that alienates a friend. Margaret is eventually forced to reconsider a classmate she was told to ostracize because of her rumored looseness with boys. There’s an awkward trip to the city to see the Rockettes, in which Margaret glimpses the private truth of a friend. All of these moments are Blume at her best, her vivid and precise depiction of life’s small lessons and discoveries. 

Also notable is McAdams, who, as Margaret’s artsy mother, Barbara, deftly paints a thorough and compelling picture of a woman of the era—someone who, like Margaret, is stuck between who she was and who she seems to be becoming. I spoke to another grownup after our screening and we perhaps guiltily agreed that we wouldn’t have minded if the movie had been about Barbara instead. 

Not that Margaret isn’t one to love. When her film is really singing, the audience is transported right back into the comforting, but not unchallenging, world of Judy Blume. Her characters, given thoughtful life by Fremon Craig and her cast, are all, most crucially, decent at heart, people trying to figure their way through life in ways hearteningly recognizable. Sweet but never cloying, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. will hopefully find the audience it will serve best: girls in need of a loving pat and prod of encouragement from an elder looking down at them not with knowing condescension, but instead with deep empathy and a conspiratorial giggle. Oh, what a trial the dawn of adolescence can be. And, as Margaret reminds us, what an adventure, too.