Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Year: 2015
Genre: Comedy Drama
Directed: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon
Stars: Thomas Mann, RJ Cyler, Olivia Cooke, Nick Offerman, Connie Britton, Molly Shannon, Jon Bernthal, Matt Bennett, Katherine Hughes, Masam Holden, Bobb'e J. Thompson, Gavin Dietz
Production: Indian Paintbrush

Greg (Mann), our plucky narrator has survived almost all of his high school tenure thanks to carefully cultivated invisibility. He wades through the school's classrooms and hallways with a light touch, only finding the time to get to know Earl (Cyler) whom he calls his co-worker. Greg is almost out of the woods of high school until he's forced by his mother (Britton) to hang out with Rachel (Cooke) a solemn classmate with stage-4 leukemia.

The intricate human details and bittersweet moments of kindness in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl elevates the film to the level of Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012). Director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon masterfully captures the generational zeitgeist of the wayward millennial with a eye for vulnerability under language fraught with sarcasm and double entendres. The film is remarkably sincere, excitingly funny and almost playful at times with its visual geometric cavorting. The film is laden with visual cues, interesting angles and Arrested Development-type (2003-present) asides that aid in the visual collage.

Greg and Earl spend their time making silly low-budget parodies of beloved art house films. Depending on who you are and your knowledge of film, Greg's pastime simultaneously provides the best parts of the film but also its singularly largest drawback. Without giving too much away, the climax of the film involves the viewing of Greg and Earl's opus which is heavily influenced on the work of Stan Brakhage. As the scene plays out it resembles (either purposely or by coincidence) the famous visual montage near the end of Soylent Green (1973) which takes away from the truthfulness of the scene. That is unless you are not a big film buff, in which case the scene will strike a cord while rendering the parodies throughout moot.

Yet the universality of the emotions shines through in beautiful and unexpected ways. Even the most seasoned and cynical will find something alluring about Rachel's plight, Greg's self-deprecation and Earl's brutal honesty. Olivia Cooke is a frail vision as the titular "Dying Girl" giving her character a unique balance of strength and fear of the possible hereafter. She's not the embodiment of all that's pure and good like Mandy Moore in A Walk to Remember (2002) which definitely works in her favor. Her mother played by Molly Shannon shares the same fear as Rachel but aptly covers her depression with alcohol and giving Greg the occasional sultry side-eye. As far as supporting characters are concerned, Shannon does the finest work of them all; though there's something to be said about Nick Offerman's stay-at-home professor.

All-in-all, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a sumptuous movie with charmingly funny set-pieces that keep the story from becoming too maudlin. Casual audiences will find a lot to love in the growing and changing relationships between the characters while serious filmophiles will be further rewarded with numerous parodies to classic films such as "Gross Encounters of the Turd Kind," "My Dinner with Andre the Giant," and "Anatomy of a Burger." The eloquence with which Gomez-Rejon uses the space of the frame and the playful use of symmetry elevates the film beyond the slew of indie dramas that are high in humanism but perhaps overbearing in their neo-realist aesthetic. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl rightfully joins The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Dope (2015) and The Way Way Back (2013) as one of the defining teen comedies of this generation.

Final Grade: B+