Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
3.5 out of 5 stars.
Opens at AMC Vets, Regency, Regal Park Place and other local theaters June 25.
This summer’s Sundance darling and buzzed-about coming-of-age film is a must-see and lives up to the hype. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl tells an entertaining, poignant tale about how friendships can be life-changing, splitting the difference between mainstream tearjerker and offbeat indie flick.
In the film, 17-year-old Greg Gaines (Thomas Mann) narrates through voiceovers, chapter titles and some stop-motion dioramas. Greg, a wry jokester and budding filmmaker, bristles at getting too close to people. He avoids high school’s messy peer entanglements, casually gaining acceptance in all of the cliques. Earl (R.J. Cyler), Greg’s sidekick, aka “co-worker,” ducks out with Greg from the “Kandahar”-like lunchroom and shoots movie parodies with him (A Sockwork Orange, My Dinner With Andre the Giant, The 400 Bros, among them).
Greg’s tidy little world gets shaken up when his mom (Connie Britton) — the “LeBron James of nagging” — persuades him to visit Rachel (Olivia Cooke), a classmate who has just been told she has leukemia. The conversations between Greg and Rachel are sweet and funny but their exchanges never become cliche-romantic. Both Cooke and Mann deliver moving performances as Rachel’s condition worsens and Greg endures the pain of possibly losing a friend.
In between the film’s more poignant moments, Greg’s dad (Parks and Recreation’s Nick Offerman) provides skewed comic relief. The kimono-wearing, exotic-foods-foisting work-at-home professor of sociology has taught his son the virtues of Werner Herzog (whom Greg imitates perfectly) and serves as a culprit for Greg’s avoidant-personality issues.
Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon elicits natural dialogue and micromoments from the cast, and the characters who populate Greg’s world treat audiences to a little more than serviceable turns. Earl and Rachel are two teens who are savvy beyond their years, whose broken homes contrast Greg’s. Earl, a boy of few words but cleverly sharp-tongued, lives on the wrong side of the tracks with a menacing older brother and his crazy pitbull. Rachel’s mom (SNL vet Molly Shannon) is a touchy-feely single mom who downs white wine to get her through the awful ordeal of having a daughter with cancer. Greg’s crush, Madison (Katherine C. Hughes), reveals more substance than the usual teen-flick hottie, and Jon Bernthal of Walking Dead plays a tough but sympathetic high school teacher who lets Greg and Earl duck the lunch crowd in his office.
The film’s narrative offers many a sweet, eye-and-ear-candy-filled moment — and a few frustrating drawbacks. Its self-consciousness reminds us that a cineaste high schooler is toying with us, and there are events that happen inorganically because of an unreliable (read: teen) narrator. These manipulations, as artful as they may be, become disruptive during some crucial moments.
Contrivances aside, Jesse Andrews has skillfully adapted his book of the same title to screen. It’s shot in the author’s hometown of Pittsburgh, which provides a scenic northern backdrop of hilly streets dotted by quaint row houses. First-time screenwriter Andrews got the help of Dan Fogelman (Crazy, Stupid, Love and Tangled) to mentor him through the process. The result is a clever, touching film that will no doubt be a staple in the teen flick oeuvre; one that will be rewatched and memorized by today’s adolescents (and adults who still enjoy doing that).
This article appears in Jun 18-24, 2015.
