From 1959’s The Best of Everything to 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada, the movies have never quite gotten the publishing industry right. Perhaps the most authentic portrait came in 2018’s Can You Ever Forgive Me?, which brilliantly depicts a once-successful writer taking desperate measures to avoid poverty. Now French-Canadian director Philippe Falardeau (Monsieur Lazhar) has faithfully adapted Joanna Rakoff’s 2014 best-selling publishing memoir—albeit with some fictional flourishes—as he attempts to capture the glamorous allure that draws young women like aspiring poet Joanna (Margaret Qualley) to New York City to break into the literary world.

It’s the fall of 1995, and a visit with her best friend, Jenny (Seána Kerslake), inspires Joanna to drop out of graduate school and abandon boyfriend Karl (Hamza Haq) back in Berkeley. “I want to write in New York,” she tells him in a phone call, but a recruiter warns her that publishers avoid hiring wannabe writers, a statement that would raise a red flag among such publishing professionals as the late Toni Morrison and other successful editors/authors. Instead, Joanna applies for a job as an assistant to a literary agent named Margaret (an elegantly patrician Sigourney Weaver), whose most famous client is the notoriously reclusive J.D. Salinger. 

Her new workplace is an old-fashioned, wood-paneled office where photographs of the agency’s clients line the walls and typewriters and Dictaphones still reign supreme despite the arrival of the computer age. “Computers make work for everyone,” states Margaret. A main part of Joanna’s job is to go through Salinger’s voluminous fan mail, weed out the crazies to avoid a future Mark David Chapman (John Lennon’s assassin was reading The Catcher in the Rye when he was arrested), and send a form rejection letter penned by Salinger in 1963, the last time the author personally responded to his readers.

Falardeau stages fanciful vignettes in which the writers of these letters speak directly to the camera; prominent among them, Canadian actor Théodore Pellerin as the intense “boy from Winston-Salem.” Frustrated that she is not allowed to write more personal responses, Joanna gradually breaks the rules, stuffing handfuls of letters into her bag to take back to her Brooklyn apartment (actually filmed in Montreal) that she shares with her new boyfriend, and composes the replies herself.

How Joanna finally takes the steps to turn her romanticized fantasy of becoming a writer into reality is the thin plot that propels this muted film. As flatly performed by Qualley, who very much resembles her mother, actress Andie MacDowell, the rather bland and immature Joanna is not a particularly compelling protagonist, and the supporting characters, played by such talented actors as Colm Feore and Brían F. O’Byrne, are equally colorless and barely developed.

Weaver is the standout here. Unlike Meryl Streep’s flashy, over-the-top performance as an Anna Wintour–like editrix in The Devil Wears Prada, Weaver’s literary agent is a complex, layered woman, sometimes mean, sometimes kind, but always fully human. When Joanna consoles her after a tragic loss, Margaret replies without a trace of self-pity, “I’ll pull my socks up.”  

Martin Léon’s lilting score adds a touch of whimsical melancholy to this tepid coming-of-age tale, although the fantasy dance scene between Joanna and Karl in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria comes across as fey and nonsensical. Production designer Elise de Blois makes a valiant attempt at transforming 21st-century Montreal into 1990s Midtown Manhattan, but eagle-eyed New Yorkers in the audience will spot the discrepancies and anachronisms. 

As for the elephant in the room, the reclusive Salinger does appear briefly on screen (played by Tim Post), seen in profile from a distance and heard in friendly phone chats with Joanna. Given all the stories about his difficult personality, his graciousness to Joanna comes off as a surprise. Fact or fiction? Based on this film, we’ll never really know.