Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. is probably a very nice, worthwhile movie. I can’t tell for sure, only because this adaptation of Judy Blume’s landmark coming-of-age book is so far from any reality I’ve ever experienced, watching it was like watching a bland fantasy film about a land that never existed, peopled by smiling denizens in sunny dreamscapes who have such mild problems that they aren’t actually problems, they’re just slightly less happy states than their regular states of total contentment.

It’s about a twelve-year-old girl named Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson) who lives in New York City with her loving parents Barbara (Rachel McAdams) and Herbert (Benny Safdie), and near her doting grandmother Sylvia (Kathy Bates). She goes to camp all summer long and has lots of friends and likes everything about her life, so the first nonproblem is that her father got a promotion and the family, sans grandmother, is moving to a big house in suburban New Jersey.

But the very first day that they arrive at their spacious new home, a dauntingly cool girl named Nancy (Elle Graham) comes to the door, the thin blonde kind that already looks good in a bikini at age twelve, and asks Margaret to hang out with her that afternoon. Then Margaret’s invited to be the last member of Nancy’s four-girl club of tight friends who do everything together.