Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

The trick with teen tear-jerkers is that, unlike with the grown-up variety, is to make it seem like the point of the exercise isn’t to make the audience bawl their eyes out. Adults don’t really care: they come to tear-jerkers to cry and so long as the film does that they’re happy. But teens want insight into the harsh realities of life and if that happens to make them cry, so much the better. The tricky thing about this trick is that it usually involves balancing a fairly smart-arse tone with subject matter that is pretty much the least suited to a smart-arse tone. Sure, it’s easy to have the smart-arse façade fall away when confronted with the realities of a handsome teenager dead before their time, but drop it too soon and it’ll seem fake while dropping it too late means the tears won’t flow and your lead will look like a dick. Which is one of the many problems with Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.
When the story is this straight-forward – introverted teen Greg (Thomas Mann), who spends his spare time making movie parodies with his “co-worker” (because Greg doesn’t have friends) Earl (R J Cyler), is pushed by his mum into reaching out to acquaintance and newly diagnosed cancer sufferer Rachel (Olivia Cooke) – it’s the little things that give it life.
Unfortunately, because the film is built around Greg and Greg is literally the most boring person in this film (Earl is from a rough neighbourhood yet is still an arthouse film buff; Rachel has cancer), those little things are pushed to the side in favour of focusing on Greg like he’s someone we might actually be interested in. Worse, while his bland nature would be fine if he was our guide to a lot of interesting stuff, the interesting stuff is often sidelined so we can spend more time with Greg – it’s more than a little telling that the big climax of the film ends up focusing on Greg rather than the person actually dying in this film. It turns out the harsh reality this film is all about is that unless you’re a nerdy white guy, your story doesn’t matter.
Reviewed by Anthony Morris