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Any residual summer-camp euphoria is almost instantaneously zapped when 11-year-old Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson) returns to her family’s cozily close-quarters New York City apartment at the beginning of Kelly Fremon Craig’s clear-eyed adaptation of Judy Blume’s “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.” Her parents, Barbara and Herb (Rachel McAdams and Benny Safdie), have news to break, but they want to break it gently. Grandma Sylvia (a wonderful Kathy Bates), who’s stopping by, has other plans. Sensing (or projecting) that Margaret can tell something is amiss from the piled-high boxes strewn around the living room, she blurts it out: the family is moving to New Jersey. Herb’s gotten a promotion, and it’s giving the family the kind of unrefusable financial security where buying a house is suddenly feasible, and Barbara, who spends afternoons frazzled as an art teacher, will no longer have to stress about providing a second income. 

By turns very funny and emotionally rich, “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret” charts the first year of the family’s leap into the suburban unknown. Margaret thankfully doesn’t have to worry long about the pains of making new friends: Nancy (Elle Graham), an assertive-to-a-fault neighbor her age, shows up on the doorstep of the family’s new digs to invite Margaret over to run around the front-yard sprinklers to rinse off the summertime heat. Her won’t-take-no-for-an-answer aplomb gives way to a fast friendship — although Margaret seems less like she has a connection with this queen-bee type than an all-too-real concern with fitting in — that comes with even more friends. Nancy has what she terms a “secret club” with a couple of classmates (Katherine Mallen Kupferer and Amari Alexis Price) with whom Margaret seems to have a lot more in common she practically demands her new friend join. 

Read the rest of the column, on Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret and Clock, at 425.