There’s a moment in the new Prime Video documentary “Judy Blume Forever” that sends us straight back to the ’70s, when the author’s name was synonymous with “naughty.”

当时,11岁的共享的平装书copies of Blume’s young-adult books that dared address topics such as menstruation and the preteen lament that increasing one’s bust was a must. Elder siblings and parents sneaked their own Blume titles later, when the author moved from the pubescent chronicles of 1970’s “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” to a teen couple having sex in 1975’s “Forever” and a married woman engaging in an extramarital affair in 1978’s “Wifey.”

The back-in-time transportive moment in the new film, which premieres Friday, April 21 — a week before thelong-awaited “Margaret” movieadaptation opens in theaters — happens when Blume talks to an old friend about a boy they both kissed as girls. Hearing Blume, now an elegant woman in her mid-80s, refer to the pair as “hot” for the boy inspires the exact cringe/intrigue factor in adults that “Margaret” did in fifth-graders.

Blume’s insistence on first-person realness, on the page and in life, centers this thoroughly delightful documentary fromdirectors Davina Pardo and Leah Wolchok, who met at Stanford University. But don’t expect the same degree of exploration Blume brought to her own protagonists. As it tracks Blume from 1960s homemaker to go-to narrator, in her 30s, of the inner lives of the cafeteria set, “Judy Blume Forever” paints its subject in an unstintingly flattering light.

For example, “Judy Blume Forever” does not delve into book critics’ reactions to Blume’s YA novels like “Deenie” and “Blubber” — information I sought less for context than from pure curiosity. (I had inhaled them at the same time as the “Flowers in the Attic” series and thus question my 12-year-old judgment.)

最终电影制作人的不加批判的方法matters little. What’s not to love, after all, about a writer who created relatable portraits of girlhood for young readers before Title IX was enacted? Blume, who rode the top of banned books lists for decades, also has consistently spoken out against censorship, in her heyday and in more recent skirmishes between literature and conservatism. And at 85, Blume was savvy enough to counter a recent Sunday Times article that suggested she was simpatico with J.K. Rowling regarding the trans community with a timely, well-written Twitter clarification.

pic.twitter.com/jaRYqNPJv1

— Judy Blume (@judyblume)April 16, 2023

It was also on Twitter that Blume joined the fight against the heinous “don’t say period” bill in her adopted home state of Florida. The bill, which would ban talk of menstruation in school before the sixth grade, might have no greater spiritual foe than Blume, who, as she recounts in the documentary, was so eager to get her period as a girl that she pretended she had before it arrived. It is comforting to know Blume, retired from writing novels and co-owner of a bookstore in Key West, is in Florida to counter all that Ron DeSantis energy.

The filmmakers interviewed several fellow authors, along with actors Lena Dunham, Molly Ringwald and Anna Konkle (carrier of Blume’s awkward torch as co-writer and co-star of Hulu’s “Pen15”), about Blume’s legacy. But these celebrity endorsements do not resonate like the interviews with non-famous people who wrote to Blume as kids.

Interviewed in the present day, one regular correspondent, Lorrie Kim, recalls writing to Blume as a girl to inquire about puberty and religion and complain about people in her house reading her diary. Blume eventually catches on that Kim’s frequent letters are substitute diary entries, and she need only answer intermittently. They form a lovely bond over the years. It’s also fitting that fan letters figure so prominently in a film that is essentially one itself.

Carla Meyer is a freelance writer.