MOVIE REVIEW
“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”
Grade: A-
Starring Thomas Mann, Olivia Cooke, RJ Cyler, Moolly Shannon and Connie Britton.
Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon.
Rated PG-13 for sexual content, drug material, language and some thematic elements. Check listings for theaters. 1 hour, 45 minutes.
Bottom line: Crowd pleasing laugher/weeper
By Roger Moore
Tribune News Service
Touching and wise, cute and occasionally cloying, “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” is a dramedy that taps into both real teen angst and behavior, and our fantasies of what we hope teens are thinking and feeling and doing.
It’s about a couple of high school movie makers and the “dying girl” one of them is forced to befriend. From that set up, the film leans heavily on high school comedies of the past. It then proceeds to go out of its way to trip up our expectations about cliques, jocks, geeks and the prettiest girl in school.
Awkward Greg (Thomas Mann) is our narrator, a camera geek who lives outside the cliques with his “colleague,” Earl (RJ Cyler). They kill lunch hours watching classic cinema (“Fitzcarraldo,” “Burden of Dreams”) on YouTube in the office of the “cool” teacher. After school, they make parodies of those films — using stop-motion animation and costumes of their own creation.
Then Greg’s mom (Connie Britton) gives him bad news. His classmate, Rachel, just learned she’s dying of cancer. Greg, to his credit, reacts the way we’d expect a teen to react. Bummer. Too bad for her. But Mom wants more. Go talk to this girl.
What’s worse, Rachel doesn’t “need your stupid pity.” But Greg has just a little charm, and thanks to his parents (Nick Offerman is his sweetly eccentric college prof dad), empathy he didn’t know he’d developed. With disarming tactlessness, he insists on sticking around, and the story begins with the title “Day 1 of Doomed Friendship.”
Olivia Cooke, a winsome veteran of the other genre of “dead teenager” movies — horror (“The Quiet Ones,”“Ouija”) — gives Rachel a vulnerable beauty. She lets us see the terror at what is coming behind whatever brave front Rachel puts up.
Mann (“Project X”) manages the sensitive insensitivity Greg has to project. He’s scared, too. He needs pep talks from that cool teacher (Jon Bernthal), and from a Wolverine poster in Rachel’s room. Wolverine (the real voice of Hugh Jackman) chews Greg out for botching the empathy thing. Make a dying girl feel worse with your jokes?
That’s one of many cute and funny touches that director and “Glee!” veteran Alfonso Gomez-Rejon slips into what should be the saddest movie since “The Fault in Our Stars.”
Cooke and Mann carry the film, her making great use of Rachel’s cancer-makes-you-wise perspective, Mann playing up the slow and steep learning curve Greg endures. “I have stage four cancer” ends any argument, and the accusation, “You’re only hanging out with her because she has cancer” makes him try a little his soul searching.
“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” isn’t deep. But this sure-to-be-a-crowd-pleasing laugher/weeper reminds us that there’s nothing wrong with a romantic comedy that reaches for inspiring and cathartic between the laughs.
