Desiree Akhavan: Not the New Lena Dunham

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Let’s get two things out of the way from the start: Desiree Akhavan is not Shirin, the endearingly self-sabotaging lead of her debut feature Appropriate Behaviour, even though she actually plays this “heightened version of my worst and best” and they share a specific Iranian-American, bisexual, New Yorker background; neither is she ‘the new Lena Dunham’, whose Girls show is regularly name-checked in any Akhavan profile, for sharing the same hip Brooklyn…