The title of the teen dramedy Me and Earl and the Dying Girl suggests the kind of twee, quirky indie filmmaking that Sundance audiences adore. True to form, Me and Earl snagged both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at the film festival in January. Adapted by Jesse Andrews from his novel, the film follows Pittsburgh high school senior and self-loathing outcast Greg (Thomas Mann). His only friend is Earl (RJ Cyler.), a laconic classmate from the wrong (read: black) side of the tracks, with whom Greg produces pun-filled, cheapjack parodies of classic films.
The titular dying girl is Rachel (Olivia Cooke), a fellow student who has been diagnosed with terminal leukemia. Although Greg only knows the girl vaguely, his mother nags him into spending time with Rachel, an arrangement both teens find horribly awkward and forced. Inevitably, however, the pair grow to enjoy each others' company, and before long Greg is lending out DVDs of his films to chemotherapy-sickened Rachel, while anxiously avoiding the topic of her looming demise.
Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, Me and Earl possesses several of the stale hallmarks of American indie comedy: Wes Anderson-esque formal flourishes, retro production design, goofy ancillary characters, and affection for hand-crafted cutesiness. (Not to mention the questionably glib depiction of Earl’s blackness.) Yet the film is consistently full of narrative surprises, chief among them the avoidance of predictable plot swerves or overplayed romantic notes. Both Greg and Rachel are self-aware of the clichéd tragedy of their relationship, and the latter is treated as an actual dying human rather than a pixie designed to solve Greg’s problems. When the inescapable heartbreak does finally arrive, it is undeniably potent, not only because Gomez-Rejon handles it with such deft, understated ache, but because of the film’s insistence on Rachel’s enigmatic, sprawling personhood.
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl opens Friday, June 26 at the Plaza Frontenac CInema (1701 S Lindbergh) and the Tivoli Theatre (6350 Delmar).
