Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

What’s the best way to treat some­one with can­cer? We’re not speak­ing in a med­ical sense: how are you sup­posed to behave around some­one – a casu­al acquain­tance, say – who’s been recent­ly diag­nosed with the dis­ease? In direc­tor Alfon­so Gomez-Rejon’s dis­arm­ing­ly sin­cere sec­ond fea­ture, which is just about the most affect­ing teen can­cer com­e­dy you could ever hope to see, this moral conun­drum pro­vides the cat­a­lyst for a trans­for­ma­tive jour­ney as trav­elled by the film’s three chief protagonists.

Dur­ing an open­ing run­down of a famil­iar high school caste sys­tem, Greg (Thomas Mann – the tit­u­lar ​‘Me’) reli­ably informs us that he has stu­dent life sussed thanks to a care­ful­ly cul­ti­vat­ed social indif­fer­ence towards can­teen pol­i­tics which, iron­i­cal­ly, makes him the coolest kid in class. This appar­ent lack of self-objec­tiv­i­ty doesn’t exact­ly enam­our us to Greg, but in mak­ing us aware of his inse­cu­ri­ties and short­com­ings so ear­ly on, Gomez-Rejon and screen­writer Jesse Andrews (adapt­ing his own 2012 nov­el of the same name) estab­lish a cru­cial char­ac­ter dynam­ic that lat­er enables them to play­ful­ly expand on sev­er­al core themes with­out dis­tract­ing us from the seri­ous and del­i­cate nature of their cho­sen sub­ject matter.

Prin­ci­pal­ly, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is con­cerned with self-per­cep­tion, the extent to which we can suc­cess­ful­ly con­trol our exter­nal iden­ti­ty and how this affects how oth­ers see us. In the case of Olivia Cooke’s ʻDy­ing Girl’, Rachel, this means con­tin­u­ing to flash her infec­tious smile at a time when doing so she requires a tremen­dous amount of courage. For Greg, it means learn­ing the true def­i­n­i­tion of empa­thy after his moth­er (Con­nie Brit­ton) forces him to befriend the neigh­bour­hood sym­pa­thy case, and how doing the right thing often means putting your own self-inter­ests to one side. You don’t need a film like Me and Earl and the Dying Girl to tell you that the effects of can­cer spread far beyond the indi­vid­ual suf­fer­er, but that does­n’t make Greg ​’s cathar­sis any less meaningful.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl won’t jive with every­one. That Greg and Earl (RJ Cyler) are Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion obses­sives who spend most of their spare time mak­ing low-grade par­o­dies of such unequiv­o­cal clas­sics as Don’t Look Now (‘Don’t Look Now, Because a Creepy-Ass Dwarf is About to Kill You!!! Damn’) and Peep­ing Tom (‘Poop­ing Tom’) pret­ty much tells you every­thing you need to know about its idio­syn­crat­ic sen­si­bil­i­ties. But then this a film that has its cake and eats it, not in crumbs of dry, exces­sive­ly tact­ful mawk­ish­ness but in heaped fork­fuls of bright­ly frost­ed melodrama.

Tempt­ing though it ini­tial­ly is to dis­miss this dou­ble Sun­dance-win­ning com­ing-of-ager as yet anoth­er self-sat­is­fied indie com­e­dy offer­ing only sur­face charms, the emo­tion­al pay­off deliv­ered in the tonal­ly uneven third act con­firms this as a work of real sub­stance. The sharp jump in qual­i­ty between this and Gomez-Rejon’s pre­vi­ous, the 2014 meta slash­er The Town That Dread­ed Sun­down, has led some crit­ics to call out the the direc­tor for engi­neer­ing an all-the-feels crowd pleas­er. That’s an extreme­ly cyn­i­cal view to take of a dis­tinct­ly uncyn­i­cal film.